Toward a complete agent-based model of a Honeybee colony

Abstract

The agent-based approach has been successfully used in the past years to model and simulate complex systems. We use this approach on a honeybee colony in a Dadant hive, where several tens of thousands of bees interact, in order to evaluate the impact of local actions at the bee-level (such as beekeeping practices) on the global system. In this article, we focus on the foraging activity, its recruitment mechanisms and the behaviour of foraging bees, and how these bees interact with the hive’s environment, greatly different in scale. We present a customizable, agent-compliant module called the Ecosystem Module, that aims at modelling and simulating the foraging, according to the local weather and the surrounding nectar sources. First results back up our model, showing that these recruitment mechanisms lead to a self-organizing process of the best available sources’ selection by the agents.