Evolutionary Search in the Parameter Spaces of the Honeybee House-Hunting Model

Social insects display remarkable house-hunting strategies when the colony needs to migrate to a new home. In many circumstances, the colony requires a quick migration for their safety. This strategy is envisaged to have practical applications in swarm robotics. In this paper, evolutionary search algorithms were applied on an agent based model that captures the house hunting strategy of the honeybees. Four search algorithms were applied (random search, mutation hill climber, genetic algorithm and simulated annealing) to find the range of parameters that lead to fast emigration of the colony. We find that a low value in the quorum and initial percentage of the scouts with high initial exploration time favors the minimization of the emigration time of the colony. The novelty in this paper lies in the use of evolutionary search strategies for fast emigration.