The PHIBee Project

PHIBEE (Population Heterogeneity and Information Transfer in Honey Bee Colonies) is a project funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU within the PNRR  - call: H2020-MSCA-IF-2020 (CUP B53C22007600006)

The PHIBee project aims to understand the effects of population heterogeneity on the collective behaviour of animal societies—namely, honey bees during their foraging behaviour—and identify useful mechanisms that confer the collective with suitable adaptive responses to be exploited for the design of artificial decentralized systems—namely, robot swarms.

This research focuses on identifying information transfer opportunities in correspondence of communication events through the waggle dance. During such events, dancer bees aim at recruiting follower bees to relevant foraging sites. Individual personality and learning differences shape how they share and integrate information, consequently affecting the colony’s collective foraging behaviour.  Thanks to the availability of long-term individual trajectories, non-invasive information-theoretic techniques allow measuring bi-directional flows of information between individuals.  The results of these analyses, aggregated to other available observations (e.g., visits to foraging sites), represent an excellent opportunity to significantly improve our knowledge of the effect of heterogeneities on the honey bee foraging behaviour. To deepen the knowledge of the effects of heterogeneities on collective behaviour, we will employ an artificial model of the foraging behaviour built with a swarm of kilobot robots. The robots offer the opportunity to design heterogeneities at will and evaluate their effect in a physical setting where movement and embodiment strongly matter, much as with honey bees. Additionally, the robotic setup will help to demonstrate how to design a heterogeneous, decentralized system with adaptive responses.