What are the fundamental behavioral rules within individual insects that allow honey bees to be social and flesh flies to be nonsocial? To test for elemental differences in emergent behavior, we measured general locomotor activity rhythms of 1, 4, or 8 individuals within a small rectangular enclosure containing food at one end and water at the other. Our results demonstrate that both groups of bees and flies show synchronized circadian rhythms of locomotor activity under constant dark conditions. The circadian signal-to-noise ratio is enhanced with increasing density for both insects, but this enhancement is greater in bees than in flies.
Species 1: Hymenoptera Apidae Apis mellifera (Honey bee)
Species 2: Diptera Sarcophagidae Sarcophaga crassipalpis (Flesh fly)
Keywords: activity patterns, circadian
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