Honeybee Decision Making Paper

\subsection{Honeybee Decision Making}

A study of selection of nest sites in honeybees \citep{seeley2012stop} has inspired a model of decision making \citep{pais2013mechanism}. This model is one of the prominent aspects of the second part of this dissertation and will be briefly presented here, and in more details in the future chapters. For a better understanding, before introducing and analysing it in detail, it is useful to describe very briefly the fascinating world of honeybees and the problem of nest-site selection. We refer in general to honeybees, however the following studies and observations are based on the most common of species, \textit{Apis Millifera}. In an honeybee swarms it is possible to divide the population according to

In \cite{seeley2010honeybee} there is a detailed and accurate description of the organization and life of a colony of honeybees; of interest for us is the problem of nest selection since it helps to reveal some mechanisms of decision making, that as we will see later, are not accounted for by a big family of sequential

Although this model is described in terms of nest site-selection by honeybees, it can represent any decision-making system in which two imperfect accumulators compete to reach a threshold $\omega$ and are activated and inhibit each other by the value of the each of the integrators.

Equation~\ref{aaa} is non-linear and \cite{pais2013mechanism} in their work, through approximations and stochastic simulation have analysed the decision making dynamics emerging from this system and we briefly recall one of the very fundamental