Bumble bee workers adopt novel behavioral roles and reshape their social networks in the absence of a queen

Abstract Dominant individuals often structure group organization, but less is known about how social networks reorganize in their absence and how variation among subordinates contributes to collective outcomes. Bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) provide an ideal system to study these dynamics: queens typically monopolize reproduction, but in some contexts individual workers can adopt queenlike social roles. Using multi-animal pose tracking, we compared matched queenright and queenless partitions from the same source colonies, quantifying over 80 million social interactions. Queen-less colonies exhibited increased behavioral variation and contained a subset of highly influential workers with elevated movement, spatial centrality, and reproductive activity that was absent in queen-right conditions. The emergence of these individuals coincided with a shift from centralized to decentralized, efficient network architectures. These results demonstrate that queen presence constrains latent worker variation, revealing how individual behavioral differences can scale up to reshape collective social organization in hierarchical societies. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes Responded to reviewer comments, including but not limited to requests to streamline text, make adjustments to statistical tests, and improve data presentation.