Importance Of Social Networks In Studying Life Of The Honey Bees
Reading Time: 4 minutes, 1 second Post Views: 1761Whenever we look at the honey bee, we see a little, hardworking, and apparently simple creature. But behind this small creature is an inconceivable story. From the actual beginning of its life, the honey bee has had a fascinating journey. The study of the life & death of honey bees has always been a preferred topic of researchers. Many studies have been carried out to elucidate the functions of different honey bees in a colony. Social interaction networks have been used to examine the behavior of bees, bonding between them, offspring survival, leadership, food retrieval, etc.
Social insects like honey bees are an optimal model system to concentrate on the connection between social associations and individual jobs since task distribution has long been hypothesized to arise from interactions. The relationship between individual roles inside the state and the social network, however, isn't surely known.
In honey bee colonies, task allocation is described by temporal polytheism, where bees gradually change tasks as they grow old: young bees take care of the brood in the hive, while old bees forage outside to gather nectar. The development trajectory of individual bees varies drastically due to several factors like sucrose, ovary size, genetics, food stores, brood age, etc.
With the approach of automated tracking, there has been recharged interest in how interactions change inside colonies, how spatial position predicts task allocation49, and how spreading elements happen in social networks. In spite of broad work on the social physiology of honey bee colonies, hardly any works have concentrated on interaction networks from a province-wide or temporal perspective. While there is impressive fluctuation in task assignment, even among honey bees of a similar age, it is obscure how much this variety is reflected in the social networks. In huge social groups, similar to honey bee settlements, commonly, just a subset of people is followed, or tracking is limited to short time intervals.
All About Network Age –
To know more about the social network structure of the lifetime of numerous bees, several methods are used to track the tasks and social interactions of bees. For this, a two-sided single frame observation hive was used by the researchers. Tagged queens and tagged bees were individually introduced into the colony. To make sure no untagged bee enters the hive, the nest substrate was regularly replaced.
A worker's assignment and the extent of time she spends in the unambiguous hive are firmly coupled in honey bees. The researchers annotated the hive related with explicit tasks (e.g., brood region or honey stockpiling) for every day independently, as they can change in size and area over time. They then utilize the extent of time an individual bee spends around there over the course of a day as an estimate of her current tasks.
Network age can address an individual bee location, provided that this data is intrinsically present in the social networks. Network age, in this manner, packs a great amount of information focused per individual and day into a single number that addresses every honey bee's day-to-day position in the multimodal interaction network. Since CCA is applied over the 25 days of the central time frame, network age can address collaboration designs that are steady over the long run.
Network age is a unitless descriptor, scaled by the researchers to such an extent that 90% of the qualities are somewhere in the range of 0 and 40 to make it practically identical to a typical life expectancy of a working drone during summer and in because biological age is normally connected with task allocation in honey bees. This scaling can be overlooked for systems where behavior is not combined with biological age.
Changes in Bee Development -
Network age uncovers differences in interaction examples and task distribution among same-age honey bees. After around six days of biological age, the network age distribution becomes bimodal. Honey bees in the practically old group invest most of their energy on the dance floor, while same-aged honey bees in the practically youthful gathering are tracked down dominatingly in the honey storage region.
According to Mr. Basem Barry, founder & CEO of Geohoney, joining mechanized tracking, interpersonal networks, and spatial planning of the beehive gave researchers a low-layered portrayal of the multimodal interaction network of a whole honey bee province. While numerous inside and outside factors drive a bee's way of behaving, network age addresses a precise method for estimating the subsequent way of behaving of all individual bees in a colony noninvasively over extended periods.
This
technique is adaptable and can extract various properties from informal
networks, opening up an expansive scope for future examinations. This methodology
features the relationship between social collaborations and individual
attributes and gives a versatile procedure for understanding how complex social
systems function.
Yes, Social interaction networks are essential in studying honey bee\'s life. In addition, it plays a vital role in the research & analysis of honey bees to researchers.