Collective decision-making in an agent-based model: Nest-site choice by honeybees swarms

Abstract

Honeybees use communication to decide for the nest-site they are moving to. In this paper, we are going to implement a model to study how the balance between independence and interdependence affects the decision process of the bees and see if a consensus can emerge. After introducing the definition of consensus, we analyze the effect of the interdependence parameter Ⲗ and the quality factor assigned to the competing choices. High values of Ⲗ promote the consensus, but reduce the system performance by increasing the convergence time.