Social networks predict the life and death of honey bees

In complex societies, individuals’ roles are reflected by interactions with other conspecifics. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) generally change tasks as they age, but developmental trajectories of individuals can vary drastically due to physiological and environmental factors. We introduce a succinct descriptor of an individual’s social network that can be obtained without interfering with the colony. This ‘network age’ accurately predicts task allocation, survival, activity patterns, and future behavior. We analyze developmental trajectories of multiple cohorts of individuals in a natural setting and identify distinct developmental pathways and critical life changes. Our findings suggest a high stability in task allocation on an individual level. We show that our method is versatile and can extract different properties from social networks, opening up a broad range of future studies. Our approach highlights the relationship of social interactions and individual traits, and provides a scalable technique for understanding how complex social systems function.

The data (interaction networks and metadata) that support the findings of this study are available in zenodo with the identifier https://doi.org/10. 5281/ zenodo.4438013 No sample size calculation was performed. We are confident that the sample sizes for the respective tests are sufficient, as they mostly comprise several thousand data points. We made sure to give confidence intervals wherever applicable, which would indicate insufficient data.
We describe all data exclusion in detail in the SI. E.g. we filter out bee detections to which our machine learning models assign a low confidence score or that are known incorrect detections because the decoded ID is of a bee that has not emerged yet. This holds for all data; we do not further filter data for individual analyses. We established these common filtering criteria after recording the data, but before beginning work on this manuscript and did not change them afterwards.
We analyzed one colony with a total of 1920 individuals, coming from 30 cohorts over 25 days. We made sure to specify the number of replications as well as their kind (e.g. over individuals, cohorts or days) for every analysis in the study.
No experimental groups were used.
No experimental groups were used.
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nature research | reporting summary
April 2020

Randomization
Ecological, evolutionary & environmental sciences study design All studies must disclose on these points even when the disclosure is negative. Methods n/a Involved in the study

ChIP-seq
Flow cytometry

MRI-based neuroimaging
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We tagged and introduced newly emerged honey bees (Apis mellifera) into an observation hive that we filmed for several weeks. The source of the brood frames that we incubated in an external incubator were hives provided by the biology department.
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German law does not require approval of an ethics committee for studies involving insects.
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