Many animals benefit from synchronizing their daily activities with conspecifics. In this hybrid paper, we first review recent literature supporting and extending earlier evidence for a lack of clear relationship between the level of sociality and social entrainment of circadian rhythms. Social entrainment is specifically potent in social animals that live in constant environments in which some or all individuals do not experience the ambient day-night cycles. We next focus on highly social honeybees in which there is good evidence that social cues entrain the circadian clocks of nest bees and can override the influence of conflicting light-dark cycles. The current understanding of social synchronization in honeybees is consistent with self-organization models in which surrogates of forager activity, such as substrate-borne vibrations and colony volatiles, entrain the circadian clocks of bees dwelling in the dark cavity of the nest. Finally, we present original findings showing that social synchronization is effective even in an array of individually caged callow bees placed on the same substrate and is improved for bees in connected cages. These findings reveal remarkable sensitivity to social time-giving cues and show that bees with attenuated rhythms (weak oscillators) can nevertheless be socially synchronized to a common phase of activity.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.

许多动物从与同种动物的日常活动同步中受益。在这篇混合论文中，我们首先回顾了最近的文献，这些文献支持和扩展了早期证据，证明社会性水平与昼夜节律的社会夹带之间缺乏明确的关系。社会夹带对生活在恒定环境中的社会动物特别有效，在这些环境中，某些或所有个体不会经历周围的昼夜循环。我们接下来关注高度社会化的蜜蜂，其中有充分的证据表明社会线索会影响巢蜂的生物钟，并且可以克服明暗周期冲突的影响。目前对蜜蜂社会同步的理解与自组织模型一致，其中觅食活动的替代物，例如基质振动和菌落挥发物，会影响居住在巢穴暗腔中的蜜蜂的生物钟。最后，我们提出了原始发现，表明即使在放置在同一基质上的一组单独笼养的白蜂中，社会同步也是有效的，并且对连接笼中的蜜蜂进行了改进。这些发现揭示了对社会时间给定线索的显着敏感性，并表明具有减弱节奏（弱振荡器）的蜜蜂仍然可以在社会上与活动的共同阶段同步。

这篇文章是主题问题“同步与节奏交互：从大脑到行为生态学”的一部分。