Physical interactions shape collective thermoregulatory behavior in honey bees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Social animals exhibit complex, coordinated behaviors that can drive significant environmental change. Within groups, individuals sense their environment and share information to facilitate collective action. Direct physical contact is a key mechanism of communication in many social species, yet its role in organizing collective behaviors remains underexplored. Here, we investigate how tactile interactions influence thermoregulatory fanning behavior in honey bees (Apis mellifera), a critical collective response to environmental stress. By reducing the ability of bees to engage in physical contact, we demonstrated that direct tactile interactions are necessary to initiate and coordinate fanning. Increasing social density by spatially constraining movement enhanced the likelihood of fanning. Using video tracking, we confirmed that elevated social densities resulted in more frequent direct contacts, identifying tactile interactions—specifically head-to-head contacts—as a driver of fanning behavior. Our findings highlight tactile communication as a mechanism for information transfer in an ecologically relevant collective behavior. This work shows how social interactions mediate environmental responses, advancing understanding of the resilience of social systems in a rapidly changing world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".