The Hive is Hungry: Exploring Bee Colony Search and Foraging Behavior through Simulation

Peter Bailis, Peter LiflandHarvard Robobees

11 Dec 2009

Overview

• Bee Colony Foraging Simulator

– Behavior model derived from Seeley

– Several simplifying assumptions:

• 2D world, no real physics, etc.

– Many modeled features:

• Bee waggle dance communication semantics, flight inaccuracy, etc.

• Focus on scouting, food source allocation

Benefits

• CS182 (AI w/ Professor Nagpal) Final Project

• Colony Team

– Reasonably complete search algorithm simulator

– Robust platform for testing—many knobs

– Potentially adaptable to helicopter simulation

• Search strategy analysis

– Several surprising results, despite relatively simple agent behavior

How do bees work?

• Bees “advertise” food sources they've found to other bees through a “waggle dance” performed in the hive.

– This is similar to local beam search.

– Better source == longer dance

• Approximately 10% of bees without an assigned food source scout for new food sources

• “Optimizes” for maximum food gathered per energy

Our Approach

• Build simulator in Python (appx. 800 lines)

• Test scout strategies (exact methods are not known)

– Random walk, random points, random world traversal, spirals

• Test food heuristics

– Real bees basically choose randomly from dancing bees

– What if we perturb this?Closest food, Greatest quantity of food, Furthest food,

Balance of quantity and distance?

Demo

Spirals

Random Walk

Distance-Food Selection Metric

Furthest Flower Selection Metric

Results, cont.

Probabilistic Best Flower Closest Flower Furthest Flower Dist-Quantity Metric

Random Walk 64.68% 82.85% 79.77% 82.46% 80.47%

Spirals 96.31% 100.00% 97.17% 98.09% 95.79%

Traverse World 71.63% 71.52% 80.72% 75.44% 74.72%

Random Points 96.50% 95.76% 92.65% 87.38% 99.91%

Probabilistic Best Flower Closest Flower Furthest Flower Dist-Quantity Metric

Random Walk 39.65% 69.35% 75.14% 74.17% 84.27%

Spirals 82.75% 85.14% 80.41% 89.98% 100.00%

Traverse World 87.11% 95.45% 93.98% 94.99% 93.50%

Random Points 82.99% 88.91% 84.72% 89.97% 88.80%

Normal World

Food Scarce World

Fin

Open source: http://code.google.com/p/beesim

References

• robobees.seas.harvard.edu

• Seeley, Thomas D. Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.