Distinguishing the Effects of Dilution and Restricted Movement on the Intra-nest Transmission of Honey-Bee Queen Pheromones

摘要

This paper develops a simple model for the movement of non-volatile phero- mone through a honey-bee hive. The model is specifically developed for a pheromone produced by the queen which is thought to regulated colony swarming. Although the model begins as a system of partial integro-differential equations, It is in the end reduced to a system of linear, first-order partial differential equa- Tions for the average pheromone level per worker, the pheromone level of the Hive substrate, and the pheromone level of the queen.