Statistical analysis
To understand how social condition influences water conservation, we fit two linear regression models, one with the absolute mass lost as the response variable, and one with the proportional mass lost as the response variable. As predictor variables, we included factors we expected to influence water conservation, including: 1) the social condition (singleton vs. paired), 2) the initial body mass, 3) the proportion of active time, and 4) the interaction between the social condition and the proportion of active time. The interaction term tested the hypothesis that social condition influences active time, i.e., if proximity to another bee stimulates activity. We confirmed that models met assumptions of normality and homoscedasticity by evaluating QQ-plots and plots of fitted values versus residuals. We then performed Type-II ANOVAs on fitted models to evaluate the significance of our predictor values. We excluded from our analysis any bees that died over the course of the assay, as well as any bees that were paired with bees that died. Results are presented as mean ± standard error. All analyses were performed in R version 4.2.1 using the “car” package [29,30].