>> The marvel of "hive mind" is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand governs, a hand that
>> emerges from very dumb members. .....
>> The theorists put it this way: running a system is the quickest,
>> shortest, and only sure method to discern emergent structures latent in it. 

All a bit new agey and mystical but peeling it away does reveal a truth. Some collective bee "behavior" is 
nothing more than mathematics (usually statistics) at work. The brood pattern was shown to happen because of the 
ratio of brood to pollen to honey on a frame. It had nothing to do with a plan to make it so, it just emerges 
from randomness. The same could be said about Tom Seeley's work on how swarms find future homes. It is 
randomness that is refined with time to deliver a result.

The bee, however, cannot be dismissed as part of the collective. It is what individual bees do that determines 
what the collective end up doing. That is exactly how the computer simulations for determining how the brood 
pattern emerges, not from the collective but from the behavior of the individual bee.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

****************************************************
* General Information About BEE-L is available at: *
* http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/default.htm   *
****************************************************