Worker bee

Host-derived organic acids enable gut colonization of the honey bee symbiont Snodgrassella alvi

Anders Meibom, Stéphane Laurent Escrig, Christel Genoud

Diverse bacteria can colonize the animal gut using dietary nutrients or by engaging in microbial crossfeeding interactions. Less is known about the role of host-derived nutrients in enabling gut bacterial colonization. Here we examined metabolic interactio ...

Nature Portfolio2024

A robotic honeycomb for interaction with a honeybee colony

Francesco Mondada, Rafael Botner Barmak, Robert Matthew Mills

Robotic technologies have shown the capability to interact with living organisms and even to form integrated mixed societies composed of living and artificial agents. Biocompatible robots, incorporating sensing and actuation capable of generating and respo ...

2023

The Foldable Drone: A Morphing Quadrotor That Can Squeeze and Fly

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Davide Scaramuzza

The recent advances in state estimation, perception, and navigation algorithms have significantly contributed to the ubiquitous use of quadrotors for inspection, mapping, and aerial imaging. To further increase the versatility of quadrotors, recent works i ...

2019

Automated computer-based detection of encounter behaviours in groups of honeybees

Laurent Keller, Alessandro Crespi

Honeybees form societies in which thousands of members integrate their behaviours to act as a single functional unit. We have little knowledge on how the collaborative features are regulated by workers' activities because we lack methods that enable collec ...

Springer Nature2017

Limitations of response thresholds models of division of labor

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

High levels of cooperation are often cited as the primary reasons for the ecological success of social insects. In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how wor ...

The MIT Press2012

Neural networks as mechanisms to regulate division of labor

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller, Pawel Lichocki

In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how work is allocated among individuals. It has been suggested that workers choose a task by responding to stimuli gath ...

2012

Task-dependent influence of genetic architecture and mating frequency on division of labour in social insect societies

Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller

Division of labour is one of the most prominent features of social insects. The efficient allocation of individuals to different tasks requires dynamic adjustment in response to environmental perturbations. Theoretical models suggest that the colony-level ...

Springer Verlag2010