> I'd hardly use this as evidence, however, that such crowding of A mellifera, at least, is of benefit to them.

No, and I didn't mean to suggest that it was. However, there may be an unrecognized benefit from aggregation. Disclaimer: the following is speculative and in fact has already been dismissed by several of the key honey bee researchers.

* * *

In a discussion about the rapid increase of varroa mites in apiaries in late summer vs the much flatter development curve in single isolated colonies, the question arose as to whether the steep growth could be attributed solely to "drifting." I don’t believe it can, and it occurred to me that there may be another phenomenon going on which has not been previously suggested.

This would be information exchange between colonies. Experiments with artificial intelligence have already proved that colony performance could be improved through inter-colony information exchange:

Different methods for information exchange in multi colony ant algorithms were
studied. Clearly, ant algorithms with several colonies that exchange not too much
information can eectively be parallelized. It was shown that even the solution
quality can improve when the colonies exchange not too much information. Instead
of exchanging the local best solution very often and between all colonies
it is better to exchange the local best solution only with the neighbour in a
directed ring and not too often. (Martin Middendorf, 2000)

Quite clearly, if an apiary pooled its resources, it could improve foraging efficiency. If the apiary somehow shared the information of successful foragers, the efficiency could be greatly improved. The question is: do they? I submit that drifting bees arriving in the wrong colony could very easily cause the transfer of information. If successful foragers occasionally land in the wrong hives, the information could very quickly spread throughout the apiary, raising the foraging efficiency of the apiary as a whole.

This could also contribute to the spread of pathogens. If a forager found a dying colony, that information would normally be related to its own hive only. But in an apiary situation, this information could be distributed and all the hives could rapidly find all the dying colonies in the vicinity, leading to a more rapid spread of mites, for example. 

Other examples: 

The inadvertent sharing of information is exploited by traffic apps which capture information from cell phone users, without their knowledge, and feed it back to them on their smart phones via their map programs, which in turn redirects traffic, hypothetically reducing bottlenecks and distributing the traffic. 

Colonies of birds develop coordinated behaviors which optimize the success of all the members of the bird colonies: "By its very nature, inadvertent information cannot be withheld by the providers and therefore its use at communal roosts can be an ESS [evolutionary stable strategy]" (Allert I. Bijleveld. 2010)

Peter Loring Borst

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