Social inhibition maintains adaptivity and consensus of honey bees foraging in dynamic environments

To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must adapt to changes in the quality and yield of food sources across multiple timescales. How do individuals foraging in groups use private observations and the opinions of their neighbors in changing environments? We address this problem in the context of honey bee colonies whose inhibitory social interactions promote adaptivity and consensus needed for effective foraging. Individual and social interactions within a mathematical model of collective decisions shape the nutrition yield of a group foraging from feeders with temporally switching quality. Social interactions improve foraging from a single feeder if temporal switching is fast or feeder quality is low. When the colony chooses from multiple feeders, the most effective form of social interaction is direct switching, whereby bees flip the opinion of nestmates foraging at lower yielding feeders. Model linearization shows that effective social interactions increase the fraction of the colony at the correct feeder and the rate at which bees reach that feeder. Our mathematical framework allows us to compare a suite of social inhibition mechanisms, suggesting experimental protocols for revealing effective colony foraging strategies in dynamic environments.