Centrality of Hygienic Honey Bee Workers in Colony Social Networks
Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Insects 2025, 16(1), 58; https://doi.org/10.3390/insects16010058
Submission received: 21 November 2024
/
Revised: 30 December 2024
/
Accepted: 9 January 2025
/
Published: 10 January 2025
(This article belongs to the Section Social Insects and Apiculture)
Simple Summary
Disease outbreaks are a common and important problem in densely populated insect colonies. To combat this issue, workers can perform sanitary tasks, such as dead body removal, which reduce the probability of group-level disease spread but may put the individual at particular risk of contracting or spreading a pathogen. Workers performing these kinds of tasks may, therefore, alter their social behavior or be treated differently by nestmates. We tested this hypothesis by observing the food-sharing interactions of honey bee workers that recently performed tasks involved in removing dead pupae from the nest, an important defense against disease in the honey bee colony. Our results show that workers still take part in the food-sharing network of the colony, even shortly after performing hygienic tasks, and could therefore serve as a source of infection in the colony.
Abstract
Many social and environmental variables can affect the interactions among individuals in an insect colony that fundamentally structure its social organization. Along with important attributes such as age and caste, immunity-related factors such as the performance of sanitary tasks or exposure to a pathogen can also influence an individual’s social interactions and their place in the resulting social network. Most work on this subject has supported the hypothesis that health-compromised individuals will exhibit altered social or spatial behavior that presumably limits the spread of infection. Here, we test this hypothesis using honey bee workers recently involved in hygienic behavior, an important set of sanitary tasks in which unhealthy brood are uncapped and then removed from the colony. Using static social networks, we quantify the interaction patterns of workers recently involved in hygienic tasks and compare their network centrality to non-hygienic workers. Using dynamic networks, we analyze the capability of hygienic workers to spread a potential infection throughout the colony. We find no substantial differences in how connected hygienic workers are in the network, and we show that hygienic workers would spread a novel infection throughout the colony to the same extent as non-hygienic workers. Our results suggest that experience with certain sanitary tasks may not necessarily produce rapid changes in social behavior. This work highlights the importance of considering the benefits of remaining socially integrated in important information networks and the temporal limitations for how quickly organized immune responses can occur in response to potential infections.
