Researchers explore how bees collaborate to stabilize swarm clusters.
If it’s a bad idea to kick a hornet’s nest, it’s certainly a bad idea to shake a bee swarm. Unless, of course, it’s for science. A team of Harvard University researchers spent months shaking and rattling swarms of thousands of honey bees to better understand how bees collectively collaborate to stabilize structures in the presence of external loads. The research is published in Nature Physics.
“Our study shows how living systems harness physics to solve complex problems on scales much larger than the individual,” said L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB), and Professor of Physics and senior author of the study. “We demonstrated that bees can harness the physicality of the environment solve a global mechanical stability problem by using local sensing and action”
This research follows earlier work by the group that showed how bees can also collectively maintain the temperature of a cluster using local sensing and actuation to prevent overheating or overcooling.
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Image via Harvard SEAS
