Whenever
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.