- Start Date:
June 29, 2006
- Event Start Time:
12:00 PM
- Event End Time:
1:00 PM
- Organizers:
Christine Agnese
- Seminar Series:
REU Seminar
- Presenter(s):
Nina Fefferman - Tufts University
- Event Location:
DIMACS Seminar room
- Abstract:
Honey bees live in complicated and highly organized societies. Female workers provide in every way for the needs of the colony while males lounge around being fed, groomed and generally taking up resources and getting in the way. They present a huge cost to the hive, all in the hope that a few of them will get the chance to mate. However, at some point, the males overstay their welcome and the workers will forcibly eject them from their hives, leaving them to die alone in the cold cruel world. So a few natural questions arise: are worker bees efficiently making the decision to eject these drones? How do we define 'efficiency' in this case: locally or globally? How can we determine whether or not the observed behaviors match up? To answer these questions, we use actual experimental hives, simulation experiments and linear programming (a method of optimization where the objective function and all related constraints are linear). This work is ongoing, so don't expect too many final answers.
