报告题目：Modeling the Interaction Dynamics between Honeybees and Food Availability（蜜蜂和食物可利用性之间相互作用的动力学建模）
报告时间：2017年5月13日上午9:30-10:30
报告地点：理学院二楼会议室
报告人：宋保军，博士，美国蒙特克莱尔（Montclair）州立大学教授。研究方向为生物数学、动力系统等。在种群生态与流行病的动力学建模和研究方面做了系列富有影响的研究工作。现任International Journal of Computational Mathematics（IJCM）副主编。
报告摘要：The success of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies is critical to the United States agriculture with 35% of American diets dependent on honeybee pollination. There are various complex factors that can contribute to a colony’s failure, such as nutritional stress. Nutritional stressors primarily pertain to food scarcity, lack in diversity of food, and the availability of food with low nutritional value. In this work, we use mathematical models to investigate the impact of food scarcity and limited storage space on honeybee viability, early recruitment rates of workers into foragers, and the influence of these rates on the growth of a colony. Social inhibition of honeybee pollination is described through the role change between foragers and workers. A threshold was found for conditions when a colony persists or collapses. We obtained conditions for the coexistence of a honeybee population and food supply as well as coexistence conditions in fluctuation fashion. Our sensitivity analysis showed that a honeybee colony is most sensitive to changes in the rate at which a worker bee encounters food and the rate food is entering the food supply. Collapse of honeybee colony is explained as a result of random impact when the bee population at the lower level of a period. However, as the Allee effect was introduced into the model, the dynamical behaviors generated from the model are richer and richer. The collapse of colony would be also an outcome of overuse of food by the bee population even without incorporating a random factor.