Biological & Soft Matter Seminar: Emergent Spatiotemporal Patterns in Insect Swarms: A Closer Look at Honeybee Clusters

Abstarct:

Effective communication is essential for survival and reproduction in many organisms. Understanding these communication signals — how they evolved and how they are optimized — can benefit from tools in physics, mathematics, and computer science. In my lab, we aim to identify design principles in natural signals, focusing on factors like energetic cost, compression, and detectability. Insect swarms offer a model system for studying how organisms use these principles to integrate and propagate signals within their groups. In my first talk, I discussed how fireflies communicate using light signals across long distances. This second talk will focus on honeybees (Apis mellifera L.), which form dense, hanging clusters, made of thousands of bees, that must adapt in real-time to external factors such as temperature changes, rain, and wind. Given the size of the swarm, a bee could potentially coordinate its activity with neighboring bees next to it, but certainly not bees at the far edge of the swarm. So how do they manage to maintain mechanical stability, which requires near-simultaneous coordination throughout the entire swarm? Using a combination of biological experiments, theory, and computation, we aim to understand how environmental cues (mechanical forces, temperature, chemical concentrations) are converted to behavioral outputs (walking, climbing, scenting) that allow the bees to achieve dynamic homeostasis. We will cover several stages in the life of the swarm: the aggregation stage where bees serve as signal amplifiers to propagate pheromone-based information about the queen’s location, the steady-state stage of the swarm with an inside glimpse into the bulk of the swarm using x-ray computed tomography, and the adaptation stage, where the shape of the swarm changes in response to mechanical and thermal perturbations. This talk will be accessible to both those who attended the first talk and newcomers interested in the dynamics of honeybee communication and coordination.