Abstract
Honeybees are highly social animals who live in large colonies, called hives. This study explores global patterns and dynamics observed in the beehive by tracking the individual behaviors. Previous research developed a high-throughput automatic monitoring system for honeybees (Apis mellifera) that tracked every individual bee in a hive, recording their positions, speed and orientations. This has been used to analyze the bees trophallaxis (two bees touching each other with their antennae to orally transferring liquid food (Free (1956))). network and calculate how often they communicate; it was found that the bee networks communicate in the intermittent manner in time, called bursts, much like human communication networks (Gernat et al. (2018)). Using this same dataset, we developed a new, complementary analysis that examined a different bee behavior that also follows a burst pattern: the bursts of kinetic energy that occur in beehives. Such bursts may be endogenous (i.e., spontaneous activity resulting from the internal interactions of bees) or exogenous (i.e., resulting from external perturbations). We sought to identify relationships between endogenous and exogenous bursts and the contributions of individual bees, as well as the relationship between the bees trophallaxis network and their kinetic bursting behaviors.