Journal
BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND SOCIOBIOLOGY
Volume 65, Issue 11, Pages 2061-2070Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00265-011-1215-1
Keywords
Speed-accuracy tradeoff; Collective decision-making; Personality differences; Swarm cognition; Nest-site selection; Apis mellifera; Honey bees
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Funding
- Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station [NYC-191419]
- Cornell's department of Neurobiology and Behavior
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Speed-accuracy tradeoffs are a common feature of decision-making processes, both in individual animals and in groups of animals working together to reach a single collective decision. Individual organisms display consistent differences in their impulsivity, and vary in their tendency to make rapid, impulsive choices as opposed to slower, more accurate decisions. However, we do not yet know whether groups of animals consistently differ in their tendency to prioritize decision speed over accuracy. We challenged 17 swarms of honey bees (Apis mellifera) to simultaneously choose a new nest site in each of three locations, and measured their decision speeds in each trial. We found that swarms displayed consistent personality differences in the number of waggle dances and shaking signals they performed and in how actively they scouted for new nest sites. However, swarms did not consistently differ in how long they took to choose a nest site. We suggest that house-hunting A. mellifera swarms may place an especially high emphasis on decision accuracy when choosing a nest site, and that chance events-such as the time when each swarm discovers a sufficiently high-quality nest site-may consequently play a greater role in determining a swarm's decision speed than intrinsic characteristics such as a swarm's impulsivity..
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