X27.00014 Sang Hyun Choi Honeybee social networks APS March 2020

This is a contributed talk by Sang Hyun Choi (UIUC) for the APS March Meeting 2020.

It was supposed to have been given at the APS March Meeting in Denver, but the meeting was cancelled due to the coronavirus.

In the talk, Sang Hyun Choi describes recent experimental and theoretical work on the probability distribution of interaction times during trophallaxis in honeybee colonies. The honeybees were monitored via QR codes glued to their backs and filmed continuously for the lifetime of the colony. The results matched what had previously been observed in human social interactions. A theory is described that predicts a scaling law between pair-wise and population level dynamics, and this is verified in honeybee and human datasets. This work shows also that honeybees are not anonymous but have individual variability and this is quantified during the talk.

The work was a collaboration with Tim Gernat, Adam Hamilton, Gene Robinson and Nigel Goldenfeld, and was partially supported by the NSF and the NIH.