Conjectured causes of absent supercritical occupancy in honeybee hives

Determine whether the conspicuous absence of supercritical occupancy states in honeybee hive behavior is explained by thermoregulatory constraints (e.g., overheating risks in large aggregates) or by adaptive regulation whereby bees control their distance to the critical point depending on the situation.

Background

The beehive dataset shows no evidence of a supercritical regime, unlike the stochastic cellular automaton model, which exhibits clear subcritical, critical, and supercritical behavior. The authors propose specific explanatory factors for this absence.

One conjecture is that thermoregulation constraints prevent the colony from reaching densities that would cause dangerous temperature increases. An alternative hypothesis is that bees actively tune their collective state to remain near criticality.