Meeting Abstract
Insect societies are complex, self-organized systems that demonstrate collective intelligence through the interactions of many individuals. Recent evidence suggests that social insect groups are comprised of individuals that vary widely in their behavior. The origins and consequences of such variation are not entirely clear, however, and the study of this behavioral variation has been challenging because of the technical hurdles associated with tracking large numbers of individuals. Here, we use an automated tracking system to study collective behavior in bumblebees (Bombus impatiens), a primitively eusocial relative of honeybees characterized by small colonies without distinct behavioral castes. Individual bumblebees show striking variation in both foraging and in-nest behavior, which is largely unassociated with morphological differences. In particular, even among foraging bees, there are strong differences between individuals in foraging intensity, with a few bees performing the vast majority of foraging work for the colony. We show that such individual variation can potentially be explained by a simple model of task allocation. Finally, we describe experiments in which we either removed or impaired active foragers within the hive to examine the plasticity of individual behaviors. Overall, our results suggest that individual variation plays an important role in regulating collective behavior, even in primitively eusocial species, and may help shed light on the evolutionary origins of division of labor in more complex insect societies.
