No Glass Ceiling for Worker Bees
The
honeybee hive would not seem to be the place to look for individuality,
flexibility in job duties and social mobility. But by using new
techniques for analyzing bee behavior, researchers at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently found that the life of a bee is
less rigidly determined than had been thought.
They
first discovered that an elite 20 percent of foragers do 50 percent of
all the foraging, and then found that membership in this group was
surprisingly flexible. When the elite bees were removed from the hive,
less hard-working bees raised the level of their activity and a new
elite emerged.
Gene
E. Robinson, the director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the
university, said he and other researchers set out to look at the
behavior of bees in a new way partly because of “an increasing
appreciation of the role of the individual in social insects.”
Teasing out the differences in individual levels of foraging activity required some new tools for observing the bees and for analyzing the data.
To
work on the first part of the problem, Dr. Robinson said, Paul Tenczar,
a retired computer entrepreneur and enthusiastic citizen scientist,
joined the lab. He worked with scientists to devise a kind of E-ZPass
system for bees involving tiny electronic ID tags, entry and exit tubes
for a hive, and laser scanners to track the bees as they passed through
the tubes (think toll plazas).
But
even with the technology functioning at a high level to track the bees’
activity, analytical tools had to be developed to understand and
interpret the data, Dr. Robinson said.
The
results, which the team of scientists reported in the September issue
of Animal Behaviour, showed first that there was an elite group among
the foraging bees.
Then,
by removing those top performers, the team found that other bees took
their place. It was, said Dr. Robinson, “elitism with a populist
streak.”
They
also found, in mining the data, that over the life of an individual
bee, patterns of foraging activity fluctuated and that individual bees
had different life histories.
The
approach to studying behavior using so-called big data is like that
used by Internet companies to track people’s shopping behavior. Such new
techniques, Dr. Robinson said, showed the power of “massive amounts of
surveillance” to “reveal previously inaccessible data about individual
behavior” in insects. And just when bees thought Facebook had ignored
them.
