The Social Behavior Of Honeybees Applied To IoT Systems
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been used to great effect to enhance beekeeping. As beekeepers with day jobs in IoT and mobile solutions, we are always keen to combine our interests. Significant beekeeping benefits from IoT technologies lie in monitoring beehives remotely, thereby reducing the time spent inspecting bees and decreasing the bees’ stress levels. However, while IoT can improve the way we care for bees, the bees have much to teach us about how we can improve IoT.
As we work to build connected cities, elevating the interplay of technology and the way we live, it’s worth considering how nature has long been doing something similar by enabling each bee to “connect” with the rest of the colony to live together prosperously.
Honeybees (apis mellifera) are fascinating creatures. As beekeepers, we are continuously amazed at how a honeybee colony behaves as a single social structure. It can be argued that a honeybee colony is actually a superorganism. An organism might appear to be a single animal, but it is actually a huge collection of different types (or castes) of cells. The key definition of a superorganism would be a social unit of eusocial animals, within which the division of labor is highly specialized and where individuals are not able to survive by themselves for extended periods. The definition certainly describes a honeybee colony.
A network of IoT devices behaves very much like a bee colony. In fact, we can learn a great deal from nature’s superorganisms. Bee colonies can teach us how to improve our design and management of IoT networks. The beehive could be considered a truly connected city. Tens of thousands of bees pack into well under a square meter, all functioning together to protect and clean the hive, gather and store food, and rear the young. The living density and sheer focus on the survival of the hive – at the expense of the individual – may not be something we want to replicate. The level of communication across the hive is worthy of admiration.
In an organism, while the cells have the same DNA, they are also very specialized. They perform different functions. A social insect such as apis mellifera (the honeybee) meets the superorganism criteria quite well. Individual organisms have hormones to organize body processes. Bees use pheromones that serve the same role as hormones. Pheromones are chemicals that transmit information from one whole organism to another. In the social structure of a honeybee colony, pheromones are used throughout the lifecycle of the bee to attract drones to a virgin queen and delineate each stage of the brood development. Pheremones also function to distinguish among the different castes of bees – worker brood from drone and queen – as well as to stimulate activity in a hive, acting as a marker to help bees identify home. Bees leverage pheromones to distribute a message rapidly, alerting others to an attack, which turns thousands of bees from passive into aggressive. All beekeepers can attest to the speed and effectiveness of this messaging.
