When should bees be flower constant? An agent-based model highlights the importance of social information and foraging conditions

1. Many bee species show flower constancy, i.e. a tendency to visit flowers of one type during a foraging trip. Flower constancy is important for plant reproduction, but the benefits of constancy to bees are unclear. Social bees, which often use communication about food sources, show particularly strong flower constancy.
2. We aimed to better understand the benefits of flower constancy in social bees and how these benefits depend on foraging conditions. We hypothesised that sharing social information increases the benefits of flower constancy because social foragers share information selectively about high-quality food sources, thereby reducing the need to sample alternatives.
3. We developed an agent-based model that allowed us to simulate bee colonies with and without communication and flower constancy in different foraging environments. By varying key environmental parameters, such as food source numbers and reward size, we explored how the costs and benefits of flower constancy depe..., We built an agent-based model (ABM) using the programming software NetLogo 6.1 (Wilensky, 1999). The model simulates an environment with a colony surrounded by food sources. The agents (“bees”) operate on a two-dimensional square grid with 400 x 400 patches. A single patch length corresponds to 5 meters and 1 tick corresponds to 1 second. Thus, the size of the virtual world corresponds to 2 x 2 km. The nest of the colony is positioned in the centre of the grid (x=0, y=0). In the default situation, environments contained two different flower types that differed in the rewards they offered. The model is an extension of a model built to study foraging distances in bees (Grüter and Hayes, 2022).
The model allows simulating a wide range of parameter values, but for the purpose of this study, we based our default parameters, such as the nest stay time (tnest), flight speed (vflight), metabolic costs of flying (Mcost), and crop capacity (Crop) on the Western honeybee Apis mellifera because we ...,