Deciding on the wing: in-flight decision making and search space sampling in the red dwarf honeybee Apis florea

During reproductive swarming and seasonal migration, a honeybee swarm needs to locate and move to a new, suitable nest site. While the nest-site selection process in cavity-nesting species such as the European honeybee Apis mellifera is very precise with the swarm carefully selecting a single site, open-nesting species, such as Apis florea, lack such precision. These differences in precision in the nest-site selection process are thought to arise from the differing nest-site requirements of open- and cavity-nesting species. While A. florea can nest on almost any tree, A. mellifera is constrained by the scarcity of suitable nest sites. Here we show that imprecision in the nest-site selection process allows swarms to quickly reach a decision when many nest sites are available. In contrast, a very precise nest-site selection process slows down the decision-making process when nest sites are abundant.