The duration of interaction events in a society is a fundamental measure of its collective nature and potentially reflects variability in individual behavior. Here we performed a high-throughput measurement of trophallaxis and face-to-face event durations experienced by a colony of honeybees over their entire lifetimes. The interaction time distribution is heavy-tailed, as previously reported for human face-to-face interactions. We developed a theory of pair interactions that takes into account individual variability and predicts the scaling behavior for both bee and extant human datasets. The individual variability of worker honeybees was nonzero but less than that of humans, possibly reflecting their greater genetic relatedness. Our work shows how individual differences can lead to universal patterns of behavior that transcend species and specific mechanisms for social interactions.

社会中互动事件的持续时间是衡量其集体性质的基本指标，并可能反映出个人行为的可变性。在这里，我们对蜜蜂群体在其整个一生中经历的对偶极运动和面对面事件持续时间进行了高通量测量。交互时间分布是重尾的，如先前针对人类面对面交互的报道。我们开发了一种对相互作用的理论，该理论考虑了个体差异性并预测了蜜蜂和现存人类数据集的缩放行为。工蜂的个体变异性非零，但小于人类，这可能反映了它们的遗传相关性更高。