Flow-mediated olfactory communication in honeybee swarms

We show that bees locate their queen by performing a cascade of "scenting" events, where individual bees direct their pheromone signals by fanning their wings. The bees create a dynamic spatiotemporal network that recruits new broadcasting bees over time, as the pheromones travel a distance that is orders of magnitude the length of an individual. We develop high-throughput machine learning tools to identify the locations and timings of scenting events, and demonstrate that these events integrate into a global "map" that leads to the queen. We use these results to build an agent-based model that illustrates the advantage of the directional signaling in amplifying the pheromones, thus leading to an effective search and aggregation process.