Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...
Natural and artificial societies often divide the workload between specialized members. For example, an ant worker may preferentially perform one of many tasks such as brood rearing, foraging and nest maintenance. A robot from a rescue team may specialize ...
In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how work is allocated among individuals. It has been suggested that workers choose a task by responding to stimuli gath ...
Division of labour is one of the most prominent features of social insects. The efficient allocation of individuals to different tasks requires dynamic adjustment in response to environmental perturbations. Theoretical models suggest that the colony-level ...
In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higher-order entities, such as groups and teams whose task solving capacities transcend those of the individual participants. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such higher-order entities u ...
The efficiency of social insect colonies critically depends on their ability to efficiently allocate workers to the various tasks which need to be performed. While numerous models have investigated the mechanisms allowing an efficient colony response to ex ...
Genetic diversity is thought to be a main factor in determin ing task performance and behavioral plasticity of social insect colonies. This diversity has two main causes. a) Multiple matings by the colony queen (polyandry) and b) the number of regions on t ...
