A General Model of Pheromone Transmission Within Honey Bee Hives

Abstract

Many activities in a honey bee hive are thought to be regulated by non-volatile pheromones produced by the queen. These pheromones are transmitted among the workers both by direct contact and by deposition on the retrieval from the wax substrate of the hive. This paper presents a general model for the movement of these pheromones through a honey bee colony.The specific pheromone used for the model is produced by honey bee queens, and is thought to play a determining role in colony swarming. Thus, the results presented here are of interest to both beekeepers, for whom swarming represents the loss of a valuable resource, and bee researchers, who are interested in swarming as an example of social coordination.The model consists of a system of stochastic differential equations describing the evolution of the pheromone level and position of each bee in the hive. The equations are studied using a numerical simulation. The results of the simulations show that hive crowding can have a significant effect on pheromone transmission, and that this effect is not simply a dilution of similar quantities of pheromone among more workers. Thus, restricting worker movement induced by crowding may have a strong effect on pheromone transmission and, therefore, advance queen rearing and swarming.