The Power of Bee Democracy

Decision making can involve seeking advice from friends or strangers believing that two or many minds are better than just one where this kind of decision making is like having a hive mind where a large number of individuals share their knowledge with each other which produces a collective intelligence where this often leads to smarter decision making among groups that is better than what one individual could accomplish alone where hive minds actually exist in real life with bees using nest-based communication to collectively make robust decisions.

Although only about 10 percent of bee species are social honeybees are very social indeed where Apis mellifera or the western honeybee is the most common of the 12 or so honey bee species where they create large colonies with a single fertile queen many non-reproductive female workers and a small number of fertile males where individual colonies can house tens of thousands of bees and all activity is organized by complex communication between individuals.

In the early 1900s scientists believed bees communicated food presence through scent but in 1944 Karl von Frisch a professor at the University of Munich made a discovery that turned this assumption on its head where he noticed worker bees searched only in the precise vicinity of where the foraging bee had been even very far away where he discovered bees are constantly waggling running and turning in circles inside the hive which is a miniature re-enactment of the bee’s recent flight indicating food source location where the waggle dance main feature is the waggle run where duration tells distance with one second equaling about a thousand meters and angle relative to vertical tells the angle of outward journey in relation to the sun where this won him the Nobel Prize.

Bees communicate other things through dance as well where a tremble dance where they rock forward and backward and side to side tells others that the foragers have brought back so much nectar that more bees are needed to process it into honey where this demonstrates sophisticated resource management and task allocation within the colony ensuring that influxes of nectar are efficiently converted to honey by recruiting additional worker bees to processing duties.

In late spring or early summer honeybee colonies become overcrowded in their nesting cavities where one third of worker bees stay put and rear a new queen and two-thirds of workers along with the original queen begin the search for a new nest site where scouts go out and look for suitable sites like a hollowed-out tree or abandoned chimney or birdhouse where bees are looking for a place protected from weather and predators and big enough for the new hive where size is perhaps most important since any colony occupying a hollow 10 liters or smaller can’t store enough honey to make it through winter.

One of the first studies about bee debates in 1951 documented how these debates typically go where on the first day two nest scout bees were identified where one reported a site 1500 meters to the north while the other reported 300 meters to the southeast where the next day 11 new dancers were identified with three supporting north two supporting southeast and six reporting new sites where the next day it rained and only two dancers were recorded where the next day many new sites were reported but interestingly the site to the north was no longer supported perhaps because rain leaked in where over the next few days many sites were investigated but only the southeast site held interest where by afternoon of the fourth day 61 bees danced for southeast with only two holding out where the next morning the decision was unanimous and the swarm launched 300 meters southeast.

By analyzing bee debates the key features of the bee’s decision-making process become clear where the debate first starts with an information gathering phase where many alternatives are put on the table for discussion where the debate then progresses with all or almost all the bees advocating for just one site indicating that a consensus has been reached where during all of this the process is highly distributed involving dozens or even hundreds of individuals demonstrating all the hallmarks of a democratic process creating robust decisions through collective evaluation and consensus building.

The dances bees perform are complex and indicate a lot of cognitive ability where bees have to remember the location of the resource or nest site as well as the location of the sun and translate that information into dance characteristics where bees in the audience then have to read this behavior and translate it into the direction they will follow where this along with the coordinated decision to fly off in the same direction at the same time supports the idea that a bee swarm acts as if it’s one organism a super organism where recently scientists realized the way bees work together is a lot like how individual neurons in the human brain work together.

Psychophysical laws explain the relation between real-world stimuli and the perception of those stimuli where brains of many organisms follow these laws where Weber’s law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus where Hick’s law says that the brain is slower to make decisions when the number of alternative options increases where Pieron’s law says that the brain is quicker to make decisions when the options to decide from are of high quality where in 2018 scientists analyzed how quickly bee colonies made decisions between sites of varying qualities and found the bee colony followed these laws closely just like a brain.

Weber’s law states that the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus where for example it might take four pounds before you notice your backpack getting heavier if your backpack was already loaded with heavy books where the 2018 study found that bee colonies followed Weber’s law where bees were able to choose the higher quality nest site if and when the higher quality such as a larger size exceeded the minimum noticeable difference demonstrating that collective perception follows the same psychophysical principles as individual brains.

Hick’s law says that the brain is slower to make decisions when the number of alternative options increases where fish for example can differentiate between a large school of fish and a small one opting to join the larger one as long as the size difference was large enough for them to recognize it where the 2018 study found that the bee colony was slower to make decisions when the number of alternative nest sites increased demonstrating that collective decision speed decreases with option count just like individual cognition.

Pieron’s law says that the brain is quicker to make decisions when the options to decide from are of high quality where these laws help relate the brain’s perception of reality to actual reality and are important when making decisions where many organisms adhere to these laws even simple animals like fish or insects where the 2018 study found that the colony was quicker to make a decision between two high-quality nest sites compared to two low-quality nest sites demonstrating that decision confidence accelerates with option quality in collective systems like individual brains.

Just as the bee colony is similar to a whole brain the individual bee thus acts like a single neuron in the human brain where decisions are made when single nerves fire waves of electrochemical signals where in bee colonies decisions are made when individual bees communicate their discoveries through a visual display to other bees where if bees follow the same laws as neurons then observing them can lead to a better understanding of our own minds and more quickly too where observing bee colonies is much easier than trying to observe the neurons of a brain while a human makes decisions.

Computer scientists have created lots of different algorithms based on bee’s decision-making methods where one popular decision-making model is the Artificial Bee Colony or ABC algorithm where it’s used for optimizing problems where users are looking for the best possible solution among many different options where in this model each candidate solution is like a food source and the quality of that solution is akin to the amount of nectar it holds where it begins with a number of employed bees at each of the food sources where they explore neighboring sources comparing nectar to previous sources and only remember the best food source they find demonstrating how biological collective intelligence can inspire computational optimization methods.

This ABC algorithm has been used to solve many real-world engineering problems across a variety of fields where for instance electrical engineers have used it to determine the optimal position of solar panels for when they are in partial shade where aerospace engineers have used it to plan the re-entry trajectory of hypersonic vehicles and computer scientists have used it to plan the path of robots where this continues until the best food source or solution is identified proving the true power of the hive mind demonstrating how biological collective intelligence translates directly into practical engineering solutions.