Reports From the Hive, Where the Swarm Concurs

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The author, on Appledore Island, watching a swarm launch into flight from the vertical board that he uses as a swarm mount. The two feeder bottles on the mount provide sugar syrup to keep the swarm well fed.
By KATHERINE BOUTON
Published: September 27, 2010


What can we learn from the bees? Honeybees practice a kind of consensus democracy similar to what happens at a New England town meeting, says Thomas D. Seeley, author of “Honeybee Democracy.” A group comes to a decision through a consideration of options and a process of elimination.


The bees are making a life-and-death decision: where to establish a new hive. Choosing a site that is too exposed, too small or too close to the ground can be fatal. Swarms don’t always do it right, but they do succeed a remarkable amount of the time, with 10,000 or more bees following the advice and signals of a few hundred leaders to re-establish themselves in a new location every spring. Along the way they have to make sure the precious queen, fatter and more sluggish than the others and prone to take a rest stop, is not lost.

Dr. Seeley, professor and chairman in the department of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, makes a good-faith case for the effectiveness of bee-management style as applied to humans, but I couldn’t help suspecting that it might have been at the urging of his publisher. Bees and ants are the management model of choice just now, and books like “The Smart Swarm,” by Peter Miller, a senior editor at National Geographic, are quite admired in the business world. But as Dr. Seeley himself acknowledges, consensus democracy requires a like-minded electorate, and how often do we get that in real life?

If we can’t learn that much from the bees, we can learn a great deal about them from Dr. Seeley’s decades of minute observation. In the spring, when the hive’s stores are depleted and the virgin queens are still in their queen cups, peanut-shaped cells in the comb, being nurtured with a nutrient-rich secretion called royal jelly, about two-thirds of the hive detaches itself and flies off en masse, settling somewhere nearby, on a branch or a mailbox, in the familiar beard shape of a honeybee scrum. At this point a few hundred scouts take off in all directions, checking out several dozen potential new sites. They return to the hive one by one, indicating, by a waggle dance first analyzed by Martin Lindauer 60 years ago, both the location and the quality of the site.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/science/28scibks.html?ref=science