Models for the Recruitment and Allocation of Honey Bee Foragers

Abstract

Honey bee foragers recruit other bees to visit productive patches of flowers by advertising, on their return to the hive, their source of nectar or pollen by a waggle dance to indicate the location and quality of the source. The distribution of foragers among sources, generated by this waggle dance recruitment, has been modeled with differential equations. Differential equation models either represent each stage of foraging - dancing, visiting forage sites, waiting as an unemployed forager, following a dance - or more simply divide the foraging force into pools of workers where each pool exploits a different site. Other models include receiver bees who work in the hive and modulate the foragers' dance response to the quality of forage sites. Simulation and individual-oriented models for honey bee foraging are briefly discussed as well as foraging in other social insects. A brief description of the application of ideas from honey bee foraging to create bee-based computer algorithms concludes the chapter.