Individual differences in honey bee behavior enabled by plasticity in brain gene regulatory networks.

Understanding the regulatory architecture of phenotypic variation is a fundamental goal in biology, but connections between gene regulatory network (GRN) activity and individual differences in behavior are poorly understood. We characterized the molecular basis of behavioral plasticity in queenless honey bee () colonies, where individuals engage in both reproductive and non-reproductive behaviors. Using high-throughput behavioral tracking, we discovered these colonies contain a continuum of phenotypes, with some individuals specialized for either egg-laying or foraging and 'generalists' that perform both.

Individual variations lead to universal and cross-species patterns of social behavior.

The duration of interaction events in a society is a fundamental measure of its collective nature and potentially reflects variability in individual behavior. Here we performed a high-throughput measurement of trophallaxis and face-to-face event durations experienced by a colony of honeybees over their entire lifetimes. The interaction time distribution is heavy-tailed, as previously reported for human face-to-face interactions.

Lifetime-preserving reference models for characterizing spreading dynamics on temporal networks.

To study how a certain network feature affects processes occurring on a temporal network, one often compares properties of the original network against those of a randomized reference model that lacks the feature in question. The randomly permuted times (PT) reference model is widely used to probe how temporal features affect spreading dynamics on temporal networks. However, PT implicitly assumes that edges and nodes are continuously active during the network sampling period - an assumption that does not always hold in real networks.

Caste-specific differences in hindgut microbial communities of honey bees (Apis mellifera).

Host-symbiont dynamics are known to influence host phenotype, but their role in social behavior has yet to be investigated. Variation in life history across honey bee (Apis mellifera) castes may influence community composition of gut symbionts, which may in turn influence caste phenotypes. We investigated the relationship between host-symbiont dynamics and social behavior by characterizing the hindgut microbiome among distinct honey bee castes: queens, males and two types of workers, nurses and foragers.