Effects of heterogeneity in the consensus decision-making of a honeybee nest-site selection model

Abstract

We study an agent based model for honeybees' consensual decision-making process. We reduce a previous stochastic model to a low-dimensional discrete dynamical system which permits a more effient study of the behaviour of the system. We relate the dynamics of the system (namely, relaxation time and oscillation period) to the distribution of the roots of a polynomial on the complex plane and give a complete picture of the transition from no consensus to consensus in the case of two different nest sites.