Honeybee Democracy

Honeybee colonies, if successful, live over from year to year. To reproduce and at the same time prevent overcrowding they divide early in the summer. The old queen departs with close to half the workers - who knows how their allegiance is decided - to start a new colony. The well-provisioned hive is left to a newborn queen and her remaining retinue. The system serves to prevent inbreeding.

In one of its many remarkable features, the colony makes decisions collectively rather than by central authority. "Doing so certainly steers the bees clear of one of the greatest pitfalls to good group decision making: a dominating leader who advocates a particular outcome and thereby inhibits the group from taking a broad and deep look at its options."

His observations led Thomas Seeley in Honeybee Democracy (2010) to compare the collective decision making of a bee swarm to a New England town meeting. A significant difference, he says, is that the scouts in a bee swarm share a singular interest in choosing the best available homesite and reach their preference by building consensus, whereas the people in a town meeting often have conflicting interests (e.g., some do and some don't want to help fund the town library) and arrive at a decision in which the majority rules. For the bees it's a matter of coming to unity like a Quaker meeting by sharing information and opinions until the way opens for optimal satisfaction of the whole community.

A swarm of perhaps 10,000 honeybees, having left their hive
and clustered in a tree, prepares to decide on its new home
(Thomas Seeley photo)

As many as a few hundred scout bees range out over several miles from the swarm for the next day or two and return with reports on relocation possibilities, usually in tree hollows. They perform tail waggle dances on the surface of the swarm conveying their relative enthusiasm for a candidate, its direction and distance. Other scouts go out to have a look. The field of choices is gradually narrowed to a point of unity among them. Then, shortly after completing their selection process, the swarm bees implement their choice by taking flight en masse and flying straight to their new home.

Seeley's book provides insights into how all this is organized and communicated within the swarm. It's an adventure story not only regarding the subject bees, but for research pursuits of the most admirable imagination and tenacity.

Greg Morrow's swarm story

Last spring I saw drones very early on in the spring coming out of this hive. The hive was really tall and doing exceptionally well. It was so crazy to see drones that early in the spring. I had never seen them that early. But as soon as I saw them that early I thought, this is a hive that's going to swarm this summer.

Greg inspecting the swarm

That swarm was up on a branch. A friend of mine stopped by. He'd never seen anything like it. The bees were doing tail-waggle dances on the surface of the swarm. There were a lot of bees that were flying in and out of this hive. They were checking it out as scout bees.

All of a sudden we heard this roaring sound, which was the sound of the swarm taking off. We thought, they're leaving. We ran back to the meadow, and sure enough, they were now 50 feet above over our heads. The next thing I see is them drifting above the quarry. It looks like they're coming to the driveway, so quick, back to the driveway. We ran back.

I had built a hive. I made it as ideal as I could, even though I could have reached up and grabbed the swarm, cut the tree branch, shook the bees and tried to keep them back in the meadow. Sure  enough, this cloud of bees came over and within about a 10 foot radius around this hive there was a carpet of bees. Over the next 5 or 6 minutes they all marched up into that hive.

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We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions.

Thomas Seeley, from the Introduction to Honeybee Democracy