Abstract

To probe the collective nature of social organisms, we measured the duration of food transfer (trophallaxis) and face-to-face events experienced by thousands of barcoded honeybees in a colony, over their entire lifetimes. The interaction time distribution is heavy-tailed, as previously reported for human face-to-face interactions. We develop a detailed theory for the universality of these findings and show that they reflect individual variations in the population. Using a measure of inequality from economics, we quantify these individual differences in both honeybees and humans. We show that bees have individual differences but exhibit less individuality than humans. This work demonstrates how individual variations can lead to universal patterns of behavior across different species and specific mechanisms for social interactions.