Meeting Abstract
Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies nest in pre-existing cavities that often have a single, small opening to the environment. In order to ventilate their nests, honey bees must exchange air with the environment through this opening. When nest temperatures are high, individual bees position themselves at the nest entrance and fan their wings, actively drawing air out of the nest. At steady state, groups of fanning honey bees are clustered together in small regions of the nest entrance establishing local outflow while passively drawing air into the nest elsewhere along the entrance. The position and number of these fanning groups varies over time. Using a custom flow-sensing device, we monitored the position of fanning groups and their influence on flow patterns at the nest entrance over the course of several weeks in three colonies. Of the infinite number of possible distributions of fanning bees along the entrance, our data suggests that fanning bees assume only distributions that minimize shear between inflow and outflow through the nest entrance. We use both computational and robotic models to demonstrate that honey bees likely use flow-mediated stigmergy to structure airflow at the nest and minimize energy loss to friction. Individuals respond to local temperature cues, but induce flows that have non-local effects on the behavior of the group.
