D3167: Social interactions facilitate collective thermoregulatory fanning behavior in honey bees

Collective behavioral responses to changing temperatures require effective reception and integration of both social and ecological information. Interaction rates may mediate this integration, as it likely does during collective behaviors such as foraging or fanning. Honey bees must maintain 34°C in their colony, or risk death of their developing brood. To cool their colony, honey bees fan their wings to circulate air. Fanning is a social behavior: single bees rarely fan and fan well beyond the ideal hive temperature, while groups of 10 bees are more likely to fan and fan at or before 34°C. When honey bee groups cannot interact, they are less likely to fan. We hypothesize that social interactions mediate the fanning response. To test this hypothesis, we established a social dose response curve to explore whether interaction rates facilitate fanning behavior. We characterized type of interaction, duration of interaction, and number of interactions in the group as we increased group size. Bees in larger groups had more and longer interactions and fanned more compared to bees in smaller groups. Our results show that social interactions may mediate the flow of thermal information, leading to a better fanning response. This work provides fundamental insight into how information is shared within social groups during a collective behavioral response.