Speaker
Description
Communication plays a fundamental role in collective behavior among social animals. In honeybees, waggle dances recruit nestmates to profitable food sources, allowing colonies to coordinate foraging effort. However, natural environments often contain multiple colonies competing for the same limited resources, raising the question of how recruitment communication adapts under inter-colony competition.
We develop a mathematical model of collective foraging that describes the interaction of competing honeybee colonies exploiting shared resources. The model is formulated as a system of nonlinear differential equations capturing recruitment dynamics, resource exploitation, and communication-driven feedback in forager allocation. Analytical and numerical approaches are used to investigate equilibrium structure and dynamical regimes arising from variation in communication intensity and resource availability.
Our analysis identifies parameter regions leading to competitive dominance, stable coexistence, or destabilization of recruitment strategies. In particular, nonlinear recruitment feedback generates threshold effects and transitions between qualitatively different dynamical behaviors. These results provide insight into how communication efficiency shapes competitive outcomes among social foragers and offer a mathematical framework for studying collective decision-making under ecological competition.
