It has been repeatedly reported that the collective dynamics of social insects exhibit universal emergent properties similar to other complex systems. In this note, we study a previously published data set in which the positions of thousands of honeybees in a hive are individually tracked over multiple days. The results show that the hive dynamics exhibit long-range spatial and temporal correlations in the occupancy density fluctuations, despite the characteristic short-range bees’ mutual interactions. The variations in the occupancy unveil a non-monotonic function between density and bees’ flow, reminiscent of the car traffic dynamic near a jamming transition at which the system performance is optimized to achieve the highest possible throughput. Overall, these results suggest that the beehive collective dynamics are self-adjusted towards a point near its optimal density.

Many organisms, ranging from modern humans to extinct species, exhibit movement patterns that can be described by Lévy walk dynamics. It has been demonstrated that such behavior enables optimal foraging when resource distribution is sparse. Here, we analyze a dataset of football player trajectories, recorded during the matches of the Japanese football league, to elucidate the presence of statistical signatures of Lévy walks, such as the heavy‐tailed distribution of distances traveled between significant turns and the characteristic superdiffusive behavior. We conjecture that the competitive environment of a football game leads to bursty movement dynamics reminiscent of that observed in hunter‐gathering populations and more broadly in any biological organisms foraging for resources, whose exact distribution is unknown to them. Apart from analyzing individual players’ movements, we investigate the dynamics of the whole team by studying the movements of its center of mass (team’s centroid). Remarkably, the trajectory of the centroid also exhibits Lévy walk properties, marking the first instance of such type of motion observed at the group level. Our work concludes with a comparative analysis of different teams and some discussion on the relevance of our findings to sports science and science more generally.

Social insects such as honey bees exhibit complex behavioral patterns, and their distributed behavioral coordination enables decision-making at the colony level. It has, therefore, been proposed that a high-level description of their collective behavior might share commonalities with the dynamics of neural processes in brains. Here, we investigated this proposal by focusing on the possibility that brains are poised at the edge of a critical phase transition and that such a state is enabling increased computational power and adaptability. We applied mathematical tools developed in computational neuroscience to a dataset of bee movement trajectories that were recorded within the hive during the course of many days. We found that certain characteristics of the activity of the bee hive system are consistent with the Ising model when it operates at a critical temperature, and that the system’s behavioral dynamics share features with the human brain in the resting state.

Many organisms, ranging from modern humans to extinct species, exhibit movement patterns that can be described by Lévy walk dynamics. It has been demonstrated that such behavior enables optimal foraging when resource distribution is sparse. Here, we analyze a dataset of football player trajectories, recorded during the matches of the Japanese football league to elucidate the presence of statistical signatures of Lévy walks; such as the heavy-tailed distribution of distances traveled between significant turns and the characteristic superdiffusive behavior. We conjecture that the competitive environment of a football game leads to movement dynamics reminiscent of that observed in hunter-gathering populations and more broadly in any biological organisms foraging for resources, whose exact distribution is unknown to them. Apart from analyzing individual players’ movements, we investigate the dynamics of the whole team by studying the movements of its center of mass (team’s centroid). Remarkably, the trajectory of the centroid also exhibits Lévy walk properties, marking the first instance of such type of motion observed at the group level. Our work concludes with a comparative analysis of different teams and some discussion on the relevance of our findings to sports science and science more generally.

It has been repeatedly reported that the collective dynamics of social insects exhibit universal emergent properties similar to other complex systems. In this note, we study a previously published data set in which the positions of thousands of honeybees in a hive are individually tracked over multiple days. The results show that the hive dynamics exhibit long-range spatial and temporal correlations in the occupancy density fluctuations, despite the characteristic short-range bees' mutual interactions. The variations in the occupancy unveil a non-monotonic function between density and bees' flow, reminiscent of the car traffic dynamic near a jamming transition at which the system performance is optimized to achieve the highest possible throughput. Overall, these results suggest that the beehive collective dynamics are self-adjusted towards a point near its optimal density.

Social insects, such as honey bees exhibit complex behavioral patterns and their inconspicuous coordination enables decision-making on the colony level. It is thus proposed, that a high-level description of their collective behavior might share commonalities with neural processes in the brains. At the same time, recent research concerning overarching features of neural activity implies that brains are poised at the edge of the critical phase transition and that such a state is enabling maximal computational power and adaptability. In our research, we applied some tools developed in the computational neuroscience field to the dataset of bee trajectories recorded within the hive, during the course of many days. Our results imply that certain characteristics of the system are remarkably similar to the Ising model when it operates at critical temperature and also shares some of the features with the human brain at the resting state