The Virtual Bee Hive.

This short paper introduces the Virtual Bee Hive, a behavioural and graphic simulator for the major functions of a Honey bee (Apis mellifera) hive. Honey bees have a social structure apparently formed from actions of many individuals leading to the construction of specific physical structures (the hive) and the appearance of coordinated behaviours. The purpose of the Virtual Bee Hive is to explore how such "super-organism" behaviour can result from a large number of simple individual actions without any suggestion of an overall controlling agency. The starting assumption is that every bee within the hive has a limited repertoire of elementary activities, which are activated by prevailing circumstances (for example: the need to forage for food, maintain the honeycomb, nurture the pupae, or regulate hive temperature) and which taken as a whole maintain the hive and allow it to prosper. We describe the support provided by the Virtual Bee Hive simulator for three key aspects of hive activity: maintaining the comb, foraging for nectar and pollen, and temperature regulation within the hive. The simulation offers a bee action selection behaviour model based on known parameters coupled to an extended graphical model of the hive and its immediate environs. In operation the model is instantiated with 1000s of individual bees and the operation of the hive - and of individual bees - can be observed and recorded. Success within the Virtual Bee Hive is indicated by the generation of realistic "emergent behaviours". Much is known about these individual aspects of hive behaviour. However, in formulating the simulation questions necessarily arise that encourage detailed consideration of the available research data and underlying assumptions.