> Still, though, who leads?  Who follows?  Who's got the directions?  Which
>scouts do they pay attention to, and which ones do they not?  You figure,
>they may have a dozen potential home sites.  Yet they all find their way to
>a "selected" one.
 
I have read somewhere that the scout bees dance directions for the different
locations they are exploring and that other bees are encouraged to
investigate.  When a "majority" of the scouts are dancing for a particular
homesite that is appealing this might lead to the dance behaviour that you
describe and the impetus to "take off".  This is, I always felt, a most
fascinating "democratic" example of sociality and hive mind, however, I no
longer know where I read this, or whether it is indeed experimentally
corroborated, or just someone's idea of what hive mind "should" be.  The
story also went that if the hive could not come to a consensus on a new
homesite by the end of a certain window of time determined possibly by how
much stores were remaining in their guts, that they would just start
building comb on the branch where they had settled.  Any comments on this?
 
>No less fascinating is the fact that once a swarm takes off and finds a new
>cavity in which to live, the bees "forget" about the parent hive location.
 
Before they actually start building comb I am not so sure they have "forgot"
the old location.  I once was working a yard where a hive swarmed.  They
settled so close and so conveniently that I tried to hive them much too
quickly I think.  They flew back to the hive they had swarmed from.  Perhaps
the queen was lost from the swarm when I tried to hive them, and in the
absence of her pheromones they returned home.  This is quite possible since
a portion of the swarm did fall before I got the rest in a box.