Economics of Social Insects? Foraging Behaviour

Valery Tereshko 1,2  and  Svetlana Lisovskaya 2
1,2 Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Inselstr.
22-26, 04103
Leipzig, Germany; e-mail: tereshko@mis.mpg.de
 2 Mogilev State Technical University, Prospect Mira 43, 212005 Mogilev,
Belarus


Social insect societies can be viewed as a complex system of interacting individuals.
These societies perform decision-making without symbolic representation; they
exploit the physical constraints of the system as well as communication among
individuals. Unlike conventional information processors, these systems are highly
flexible and fault tolerant. Despite the fact that each individual follows only a few
simple rules, interactions between individuals can lead to the emergence of collective
behaviour, which enables the colony to make intelligent decisions in complicated and changing environment.

One of the main activities of social insect societies featuring intelligent decision
making in complex and unpredictable environments is foraging behaviour. We show
how organization of colony?s ?economics?, i.e. behavioural repertoires and
communication among insects, leads to emergence of the colony?s collective foraging
behaviour. A model we developed mimics, in principle, the main features of foraging
for different social insect societies. We focus, however, on a honeybee colony.

The model utilizes two dominant components of colony's foraging behaviour --
recruitment to located food source and abandonment of it. The foraging mechanism is
based upon competition of employed foragers advertising their nectar sources for pool
of unemployed foragers, which is analogous to competition of species for limited
resource. When an unemployed forager has access to all waggle dances
(advertisements) to sample the dance she encountered, a common ?labour market? is
formed, which leads to rapid selection of the most profitable nectar source. Otherwise,
when unemployed foragers quickly acquire information only about some parts of
environment, different niches where individuals are associated mainly with a
particular ?job sites? are formed, and correspondent foraging trails coexist for a long
period. Our results elucidate the role of natural clustering of the dances in the small
area of the have -- it has to facilitate the information flow that is beneficial for overall
process of colony's food collection.
Social insect dynamics can provide useful metaphors for designing insect-like robots and understanding collective robotics.