I don't think there is much randomness in what bees do.  All bees travel the colony pretty much all the time.  This gives them a decent assessment of its size, state, resources, and season-adjusted needs.  Then, they respond to the needs.  Individual bees flex to the tasks most needing completion (in manufacturing, this is called demand flow technology).  It's a management by common objectives organization.

There is signal ling between individual bees and there is an overall signal ling based on the colony assessment.  I wish I could read it better but bee buzzing is different depending on the state of the colony.  Buzzing induces vibratory response in the comb which can be picked up from its one end to another by all the bees.  This is complemented by odor communication.

Bees excel at assessment and analysis of their nest's needs.  This may all be hard-wired programming without much of what we think of as intelligence.  And there is certainly a consensus building process as well since different races of bees have slightly different preferences.  A colony consists of a number of patrilines with potentially differing goals and they all need to pick the common ones.

Waldemar 

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