The 3-dimensional nest of the honey bee: organization, development, and impact on colony function

An organism’s appearance is the result of evolutionary pressures, and these same pressures apply to the structures that organisms build, such as nests. When a built structure has a stereotypical appearance, this suggests that the structure itself serves a role (e.g., a bird’s nest must keep the eggs from rolling out). In social insects, nests are critical for colony survival, growth, and reproduction, and workers typically organize their nests into distinct regions.

In nests of the Western honeybee, Apis mellifera, workers generally rear brood in the center of the nest, and store honey at the top. However, beyond general descriptions of nest organization, our understanding of how patterns are initiated, and persist over colony development, are poorly understood. Furthermore, while we assume that nest organization is important for colony function, this not been explicitly tested.

To perform this work, we will develop new methods for assaying colonies in the field, and for processing nest images. Understanding how honeybee colonies naturally organize their nests, and the impact of disrupting this organization, is important for understanding how social groups partition space. Honeybees are also critical pollinators in the modern agricultural landscape, and many of our beekeeping techniques explicitly disrupt nest organization, the impacts of this practice are so far unknown.

Knowing how honeybees naturally organize their nests will help us to better manage this premier pollinator. This project will also strengthen ties amongst the Southeastern community of beekeepers and those who research honeybees in an inaugural conference. It also develops and shares new tools for further research on honeybee colony structure.

Social insects are masters of solving organizational problems because they must coordinate thousands of individuals to accomplish key biological imperatives (to survive, grow, and reproduce). This includes the spatial organization of resources within the nest, presumably to maximize colony performance. While general patterns of honeybee nest organization have been preserved in over 34 million years of Apis evolution, suggesting an adaptive function, this hypothesis has never been tested.

Indeed, even in the honeybee (Apis mellifera), our premier agricultural pollinator, we lack a 3-dimensional description of nest organization over a colony’s life. The goal of this research is to understand how honeybee nests are organized, and how disrupting nest organization impacts colony function. In Aim 1, we will perform the first-ever 3-dimensional description of honeybee colony growth, development, and reproduction over time.

In Aim 2, we will test the impact of experimentally disrupting 3-dimensional nest organization, to understand how nest organization contributes to colony function. In Aim 3, we will test potential mechanisms for how workers generate and maintain patterns of nest organization at different scales (whole-nest; per-comb; per-cell). To support these aims, we will develop two Methodological Innovations: (1) a field-ready photography rig, and (2) an automated classifier of comb contents.

Together, this proposal has implications for biological patterning, decentralized architecture, and may challenge (or reinforce) the underlying assumption that form follows function. Understanding how individual behaviors lead to spatial organization will reveal how evolution builds collective systems that shape their environment to accomplish group-level goals.

This project is jointly funded by the Behavioral Systems Cluster and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.