The rise and evolution of a referential code in populations of bee-like agents

Abstract

Communication typically relies on a shared code, and any change to it must be coordinated between senders and receivers to avoid a breakdown of communication. The honeybee waggle dance illustrates this problem: species with horizontal combs point directly at a food source, while species with vertical combs cannot point directly and instead reference the dance to gravity, decoded against the position of the sun. We model the rise of the first of these codes and its evolutionary transition to the second in populations of bee-like agents, with selection acting at the level of colonies. In a horizontal-comb model, we find that direct pointing evolves readily when food is moderately hard to find by random search alone, whether because sites are few and large or many and small. Communication fails to evolve when food is too sparse to spark dances or so abundant that it is found without signaling. Adding an exogenous benefit for vertical combs, we then find that the transition to the gravity-referenced code is driven mainly by the magnitude of this benefit and by the mutation scale, with the coupling between sender and receiver mutations playing a further role when the mutation scale is low. Given a favorable confluence of these factors, the transition proceeds reliably and without a breakdown of communication. Outside that confluence it remains possible, though rarer, across a much wider range of settings.