Thursday morning talk with Benjamin Wild: Social networks through time – Individuality in a colony of honey bees

ABSTRACT:
In many social systems, an individual’s role is reflected by its interactions with other members of the group. In many model organisms, and particularly in social insects, the patterns of actions and interactions among individuals are not static but constantly evolving over time. This can be due to the emergence or demise of certain individuals, changing task allocation because of temporal polyethism and changes in the environment, or many other reasons. Understanding such temporal patterns in complex social networks remains a challenging problem. In this talk, I will present two recent approaches we have developed to extract meaningful and inherently interpretable embeddings of the social behavior of honey bees from temporal interaction matrices. The embeddings allow us to describe an individual’s role in the colony at any point during her life, to detect clusters of social development of individuals, to compare the structure of the networks at different times, and to compare the role of individuals in the social structure in a meaningful way even when they were never alive at the same time.

(Photo by Nathaniel Sison on Unsplash)