ArticleNature communications2021
Social networks predict the life and death of honey bees.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using semi-folded arenas to observe spontaneous emergence of collective trails in whole colonies of termites.Movement ecology · 2026Article
- Establishing standards for genome wide association studies in eusocial insects through a case study in honey bees.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A technical semi-field methodology to measure the effect of nutrition on honey bee brood rearing.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Bayesian multiplex network models in R using STRAND: methods for biologists and social scientists.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Genetic variation influences food-sharing sociability in honey bees.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Age polyethism can emerge from social learning: A game-theoretic investigation.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Disruption of collective behaviour correlates with reduced interaction efficiency.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Information sharing within a social network is key to behavioral flexibility-Lessons from mice tested under seminaturalistic conditions.Science advances · 2025Article
- Pheromone relay networks in the honeybee: messenger workers distribute the queen's fertility signal throughout the hive.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Shift in distribution of division of labour in chronically stressed honeybee colonies after perturbation.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Foraging distance distributions reveal how honeybee waggle dance recruitment varies with landscape.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Ant social network structure is highly conserved across species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Individualized social niches in animals: Theoretical clarifications and processes of niche change.Bioscience · 2024Review
- How honeybees respond to heat stress from the individual to colony level.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Identifying a developmental transition in honey bees using gene expression data.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Machine learning reveals the waggle drift's role in the honey bee dance communication system.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Colony size buffers interactions between neonicotinoid exposure and cold stress in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Spontaneous and information-induced bursting activities in honeybee hives.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Automated monitoring of honey bees with barcodes and artificial intelligence reveals two distinct social networks from a single affiliative behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Both age and social environment shape the phenotype of ant workers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In complex societies, individuals' roles are reflected by interactions with other conspecifics. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) generally change tasks as they age, but developmental trajectories of individuals can vary drastically due to physiological and environmental factors. We introduce a succinct descriptor of an individual's social network that can be obtained without interfering with the colony. This 'network age' accurately predicts task allocation, survival, activity patterns, and future behavior. We analyze developmental trajectories of multiple cohorts of individuals in a natural setting and identify distinct developmental pathways and critical life changes. Our findings suggest a high stability in task allocation on an individual level. We show that our method is versatile and can extract different properties from social networks, opening up a broad range of future studies. Our approach highlights the relationship of social interactions and individual traits, and provides a scalable technique for understanding how complex social systems function.
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