The fanciful notion of a "bee superorganism" is a mislabeling of "emergent behavior" of a large number of autonomous individuals.
But there is no "Borg-like hive-mind" (the Borg being the nemesis of all sentient beings in the 1980s "Star Trek" remakes). Each individual merely responds to cues, and follows simple rules.
In Manhattan, such emergent behavior is called "Tuesday". Pre-pandemic, 4.7 million people a day left their homes in the city, and commuted to work, somewhere else in the city. More people commuted in from outside the city by bike, car, ferry, bus, train, or chopper. No master intelligence choreographs this intricate twice-daily ballet, but everyone somehow got to work on time, and got home again, even in the face of a wide range of significant needs to detour, adapt, and overcome. (A typical pop quiz would be the subway announcement "Passengers: This A train is now a D train running on the F line between Canal Street and Jay St/Metrotech. For service to York St, take the C Train to Hoyt-Schemerhorn...")
The 2018 paper linked below from the journal "Nature Physics" is a good example of the ability of a large number of bees to appear to be under organized central control when they clearly are not by shaking the heck out of a swam, and looking at how it maintains an optimal "catenary curve" shape under extreme conditions. Bees act a whole lot like water molecules, and do a good job of "obeying" the same rules of "surface tension" as shape a droplet of water to maximize the stability of their cluster.
"...our findings highlight how a super-organismal structure responds to dynamic loading by actively changing its morphology to improve the collective stability of the cluster at the expense of increasing the average mechanical burden of an individual."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GuVgeMwSD3VDdL4yy3Dth7FlxZ1w2aKk/view?usp=sharing
https://tinyurl.com/rrrdmxy5
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