Ivan Shpurov and Tom Froese Phys. Rev. E 113, 024405

The collective behavior of numerous animal species, including insects, exhibits scale-free behavior indicative of the critical (second-order) phase transition. Previous research uncovered such phenomena in the behavior of honeybees, most notably the long-range correlations in space and time. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the bee activity in the hive manifests the hallmarks of the jamming process. We follow up by presenting a discrete model of the system that faithfully replicates some of the key features found in the data, such as the divergence of correlation length and scale-free distribution of jammed clusters. The dependence of the correlation length on the control parameter, density, is demonstrated for both the real data and the model. We conclude with a brief discussion on the contribution of the insights provided by the model to our understanding of the insects’ collective behavior.

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