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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.

To operate autonomously, minimal robot swarms must make timely and reliable collective decisions despite noisy individual sensing and severe constraints on communication, computation, and memory.

Bees and flowering plants share one of nature’s most elegant and essential symbiotic relationships. This relationship goes beyond the visible interactions of bees landing on flowers and emerging covered in pollen.

An RFID study of stingless bees found that seemingly minor environmental cues strongly affected how reliably returning foragers identified their own colonies.

Female Megalopta sweat bees must choose whether to remain as helpers in their mother’s nest or leave to reproduce independently.

Researchers selectively silenced neural circuits associated with the doublesex gene in older honeybee workers and caused them to resume queen-care duties normally performed by younger bees.

A honeybee-inspired study compares centrally directed organisations with decentralized groups whose members allocate work through local communication and differing behavioural thresholds.

A mathematical study of leaderless collectives found that efficient groups need only a small number of persistent risk-takers to explore during poor conditions, while the majority wait for favourable signals.

Honeybee groups carry distinct chemical signatures used to distinguish nestmates from outsiders, but those signatures change when groups are brought together.

Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/bees-use-tools-to-solve-problems-study-finds