Teaching resources · Animal behavior
Honeybee house hunting
A honeybee swarm has to choose a new home. Change the number and quality of nest sites and see how scouts reach a group decision.
Created by Jessie Ebie and Ted Pavlic.
An interactive NetLogo Web model. Press setup, then go. It takes a few seconds to load. On a phone, open the model in its own tab for more room.
About the activity
Based on Thomas Seeley’s research on how honeybee swarms choose a nest site, this agent-based model lets students form hypotheses, design experiments, collect data, and interpret results during class, even in a large lecture with no lab. I developed it with Ted Pavlic to teach group decision-making and social behavior in a 170-student animal behavior course, and later adapted the activity for the first day of introductory biology to review the scientific process.
Learning objectives
- Compare and contrast the costs and benefits of group living
- Develop a hypothesis or prediction and design an experiment
- Interpret data to explain group decision-making in social animals
For instructors
- Google Form for class data entry An example of the format. Make your own copy for your class.
- Sample data Opens a copy in your own Google Drive.
Model © 2012 Jessica Ebie and Theodore Pavlic, based on Seeley (1989) and Seeley and Buhrman (1999, 2001). Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.