Modeling bee swarming behavior through diffusion adaptation with asymmetric information sharing

Abstract

Honeybees swarm when they move to a new site for their hive. During the process of swarming, their behavior can be analyzed by classifying them as informed bees or uninformed bees, where the informed bees have some information about the destination while the uninformed bees follow the informed bees. The swarm's movement can be viewed as a network of mobile nodes with asymmetric information exchange about their destination. In these networks, adaptive and mobile agents share information on the fly and adapt their estimates in response to local measurements and data shared with neighbors. Diffusion adaptation is used to model the adaptation process in the presence of asymmetric nodes and noisy data. The simulations indicate that the models are able to emulate the swarming behavior of bees under varied conditions such as a small number of informed bees, sharing of target location, sharing of target direction, and noisy measurements. © 2012 Li and Sayed.