ArticleScientific reports2018
Behavioral flexibility promotes collective consistency in a social insect.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Division of labour during honeybee colony defence: poetic and scientific views.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Ontogeny of energy use in harvester ant colonies, and the metabolic expense of colony growth.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Determinants of hyena participation in risky collective action.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Synchrony to a beat predicts synchrony with other minds.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
- Extracting individual characteristics from population data reveals a negative social effect during honeybee defence.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- The emergence of a collective sensory response threshold in ant colonies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Bumblebee resilience to climate change, through plastic and adaptive responses.Global change biology · 2021Review
- A model of resource partitioning between foraging bees based on learning.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Collective ventilation in honeybee nests.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Deciphering the mechanisms that integrate individuals and their behavior into a functional unit is crucial for our understanding of collective behaviors. We here present empirical evidence for the impressive strength of social processes in this integration. We investigated collective temperature homeostasis in bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies and found that bees are less likely to engage in thermoregulatory fanning and do so with less time investment when confronted with heat stress in a group setting than when facing the same challenge alone and that this down-regulation of individual stimulus-response behavior resulted in a consistent proportion of workers in a group engaged in the task of fanning. Furthermore, the bees that comprised the subset of fanning individuals changed from trial to trial and participation in the task was predominately unpredictable based on previous response behavior. Our results challenge basic assumptions in the most commonly used class of models for task allocation and contrast numerous collective behavior studies that emphasize the importance of fixed inter-individual variation for the functioning of animal groups. We demonstrate that bumblebee colonies maintain within-group behavioral heterogeneity and a consistent collective response pattern based on social responsiveness and behavioral flexibility at the individual level.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.