Fig 5. Trade-off between fast dissemination and efficient mixing described by the $\tilde{\delta }$ model.

(a) While the colony state (P_colony, green) rises with the fraction $\tilde{\delta }$ of transferred volume, mixing levels among non-foragers (which we call H_mix) decrease. The mixing levels over all ants in the colony (including the foragers) is the product of these two functions, $H_{\text{mix}}^{\text{overall}}=P_{\text{colony}}·H_{\text{mix}}$ and displays a broad maximum which spans all non-extreme values of $\tilde{\delta }$. Curves can be compared to the empirically measured values (red bars) of the three experiments. (b) Standard deviation of individual mixing entropies $h_{\text{mix}}^a$ across all ants. Standard deviations were calculated for 30 model runs. The plot depicts the mean and standard deviation of this value.