  In the beeswax combs of honey bees, the cells of brood, pollen, and honey
have a consistent spatial pattern that is sustained throughout the life of a
colony. This spatial pattern is believed to emerge from simple behavioral rules
that specify how the queen moves, where foragers deposit honey/pollen and how
honey/pollen is consumed from cells. Prior work has shown that a set of such
rules can explain the formation of the allocation pattern starting from an
empty comb. We show that these rules cannot maintain the pattern once the brood
start to vacate their cells, and we propose new, biologically realistic rules
that better sustain the observed allocation pattern. We analyze the three
resulting models by performing hundreds of simulation runs over many
gestational periods and a wide range of parameter values. We develop new
metrics for pattern assessment and employ them in analyzing pattern retention
over each simulation run. Applied to our simulation results, these metrics show
alteration of an accepted model for honey/pollen consumption based on local
information can stabilize the cell allocation pattern over time. We also show
that adding global information, by biasing the queen's movements towards the
center of the comb, expands the parameter regime over which pattern retention
occurs.
