Behavioral variation across the days and lives of honey bees

Behavioral variation across the days and lives of honey bees

Blog Article

Summary: In honey bee colonies, workers generally change tasks with age (from brood care, to nest work, to foraging).While these trends are well established, our understanding of how individuals distribute tasks during a day, and how individuals differ in their nail care lifetime behavioral trajectories, is limited.Here, we use automated tracking to obtain long-term data on 4,100+ bees tracked continuously at 3 Hz, across an entire summer, and use behavioral metrics to compare behavior at different timescales.

Considering single days, we describe how bees differ in space use, detection, and movement.Analyzing R/C Helicopter the behavior exhibited across their entire lives, we find consistent inter-individual differences in the movement characteristics of individuals.Bees also differ in how quickly they transition through behavioral space to ultimately become foragers, with fast-transitioning bees living the shortest lives.

Our analysis framework provides a quantitative approach to describe individual behavioral variation within a colony from single days to entire lifetimes.