Using A-Life to Study Bee Life: The Economics of Central Place Foraging

In this paper I model behavior exhibited by bees and ants when central place foraging. I evolve the choice of how many food sources the animat should visit in order to maximize either energy gain per time, or energetic efficiency. An accurate model of the energetic costs and time required to fly to the flower patch, collect nectar, and return to the hive results in a model that is more realistic than those created using more traditional techniques. The increased realism in this model allows me to highlight a discrepancy between proposed theoretical models of the economics of bee foraging and the observed behavior of bees.