Coping with complexity: Variety regulation by honey bee nectar foragers

Abstract

In the age of social networks, and also of an extensive use of Artificial Intelligence, a deeper understanding of the interactions among thousands of individuals should help us in the quest of designing effective procedures to manage the ‘bigdata’ that is overwhelming our human capacity to deal with increasing complexity. This paper offers insights, grounded in the bee colonies natural evolution, to manage this detailed complexity or variety. Variety balances between the nectar foraging and storage operations of the honey bee colony are important for its growth and survival. If there is an optimal variety balance between foragers and storers, their work capacities will be matched and the two operations will function at maximum efficiency. Foragers sense variety imbalances by observing significant deviations from the normal mean levels of the queuing delay experienced when they unload their nectar to the food storers. If there is a short delay, they perform waggle dances to recruit additional foragers but, if there is a long delay, they perform tremble dances to recruit additional storers. These signals reallocate labour to rebalance the system. In addition, algedonic signals are used to recruit or inhibit workers in emergencies. This study shows how a self-organising system can sense and correct variety imbalances without any metasystemic intervention or design.