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Optimizing flexibility in the collective decisions of honeybees

Honeybees make decisions as a group while searching for a new home site or foraging. The quality of each choice influences the rate at which scout bees recruit others via a waggle dance. In addition, decided bees can influence those with opposing opinions to change their minds via “stop-signals.” Most previous experimental studies have assumed bee swarms make decisions in static environments, but most natural environments are dynamic. In such cases, bees should adapt to new evidence as the environment constantly changes. One way of adapting is to abandon one’s current opinion and restart the evidence-accumulation and decision process (Seeley et al 2012). Incorporating such individual behavior into a dynamical model leads to a collective decision-making process that discounts previous evidence and weights newer information more strongly. We show that properly tuning this “forgetting” process can improve a swarm’s performance on a foraging task in a dynamic environment. Individual forgetfulness allows the group to change its mind, and move to a higher yielding foraging site. Our analysis explores parameter-dependent changes in the foraging yield using bifurcation theory and fast/slow analysis in a mean field version of the collective decision-making model.

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