Search for: All records

Summary Dominant individuals often structure group organization, but less is known about how social networks differ in their absence or how variation among subordinates contributes to collective outcomes. Bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) provide an ideal system to study how individual behavior shapes colony organization: queens typically monopolize reproduction, but in some contexts individual workers can adopt queen-like social roles. We asked how this process shapes the collective phenotype. Using multi-animal pose tracking to quantify social behaviors, we compared matched queenright and queenless partitions from the same source colonies. Queenless colonies were more interactive and contained a subset of behaviorally extreme queen-like workers with higher movement, spatial centrality, and reproductive potential. Such variation, absent in queenright colonies, coincided with a shift to decentralized, efficient network structures. These results demonstrate how social context shapes the expression of individual phenotypes, revealing a mechanism by which seemingly hierarchical societies can retain latent social flexibility and underscoring the link between individual variation and collective organization.