Relating individual behaviour to population dynamics

How do the behavioural interactions between individuals in an ecological sy stem produce the global population dynamics of that system? We present a st ochastic; individual-based model of the reproductive cycle of the mite Varr oa jacobsoni, a parasite of honeybees. The model has the interesting proper ty in that its population level behaviour is approximated extremely accurat ely by the exponential logistic equation or Ricker map. We demonstrated how this approximation is obtained mathematically and how the parameters of th e exponential logistic equation can be written in terms of the parameters o f the individual-based model. Our procedure demonstrates, in at least one c ase, how study of animal ecology at an individual level san be used to deri ve global models which predict population change over time.