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.