Bumble bee colonies can reorganise from a queen-centred hierarchy into a more decentralised social network when the queen disappears.
Researchers tracked more than 80 million interactions in matched queenright and queenless Bombus impatiens colonies. Without a queen, behavioural variation increased and a subset of workers became unusually mobile, spatially central and reproductively active. Their emergence coincided with a shift toward more decentralised and efficient network structures, showing how latent differences among individual agents can rapidly reshape collective organisation after removal of a dominant coordinator.
