Kannan Kavitha, Galizia C Giovanni, Nouvian Morgane
Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Center for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 Jan 29;12(1):241295. doi: 10.1098/rsos.241295. eCollection 2025 Jan.
Whether individuals exhibit consistent behavioural variation is a central question in the field of animal behaviour. This question is particularly interesting in the case of social animals, as their behaviour may be strongly modulated by the collective. In this study, we ask whether honeybees exhibit individual differences in stinging behaviour. We demonstrate that bees are relatively stable in their decision to sting-or not-in a specific context and show temporal consistency suggestive of an internal state modulation. We also investigated how social factors such as the alarm pheromone or another bee modulated this behaviour. The presence of alarm pheromone increased the likelihood of a bee to sting but this response decayed over trials, while the presence of a conspecific decreased individual stinging likelihood. These factors, however, did not alter stinging consistency. We therefore propose that social modulation acts by shifting the stinging threshold of individuals. Finally, experimental manipulation of group composition with respect to the ratio of aggressive and gentle bees within a group did not affect the behaviour of focal bees. Overall, our results establish honeybee stinging behaviour as a promising model for studying mechanistically how collective and individual traits interact to regulate individual variability.
个体是否表现出一致的行为差异是动物行为领域的核心问题。对于群居动物而言，这个问题尤为有趣，因为它们的行为可能会受到群体的强烈调节。在本研究中，我们探究蜜蜂在蜇刺行为上是否存在个体差异。我们证明，蜜蜂在特定情境下蜇刺或不蜇刺的决定相对稳定，并且表现出时间上的一致性，这表明存在内部状态调节。我们还研究了诸如报警信息素或另一只蜜蜂等社会因素如何调节这种行为。报警信息素的存在增加了蜜蜂蜇刺的可能性，但这种反应在试验过程中会衰减，而同种蜜蜂的存在则降低了个体蜇刺的可能性。然而，这些因素并没有改变蜇刺的一致性。因此，我们认为社会调节是通过改变个体的蜇刺阈值来起作用的。最后，对群体组成进行实验操作，改变群体中攻击性蜜蜂和温顺蜜蜂的比例，并未影响目标蜜蜂的行为。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，蜜蜂蜇刺行为是一个很有前景的模型，可用于从机制上研究集体特征和个体特征如何相互作用以调节个体变异性。
