Inter-individual variation in circadian rhythm across species of halictid bees: characterizing varying clocks and motif classification.

Abstract

How sociality interacts with other behaviours is a long standing question in insect biology. Simultaneously, in chronobiology, there is an unanswered question concerning how sociality influences patterns of daily activity. Past studies have established the viability of utilizing hymenopterans to describe variable circadian behaviour. Here, we intend to take a step further and establish Halictid bees as a model for cross-species comparisons of circadian rhythms. To this effect, we describe four species of Halictid bees and compare the variability of their internal clocks. We found that variability in circadian rhythms parallel complexity in sociality. We also created a machine learning pipeline to facilitate describing heterogeneous locomotor activity data. The computational experiments showed that the bee locomotion dataset transformed by Symbolic Aggregate approXimation and classified by decision trees yielded the best results. With our findings, we expect to set the basis for finding the true influence of sociality on biological clocks.