Effects of honey bee wing fanning on chemical cue transport in hive-like conditions

In honey bee hives, worker bees use chemical cues emitted by a queen to aggregate around her. In this study, we investigate how wing fanning and body movements by worker bees may act to relay queen pheromones to more distant worker bees. We built a simple flow facility to study walking and fanning bees in the presence of a queen, and used particle image velocimetry to measure induced velocity fields. Wing fanning accelerated flow downstream of worker bees and generated vortices that stir and stretch filaments of pheromone emitted by the queen. This suggests that wing fanning may pass chemical information between bees to facilitate locating the queen via chemotaxis. We will study how ambient flow through the hive impacts induced flow fields, and work to understand how wing motion induces relevant flow structures.