Christian wrote:
        If the creature chooses to do this or do that, whether for
good and sufficient reason, or just on a whim, I would take it to be
a sign of consciousness.

Peter:
        So, what choices does a honeybee colony make? Actually, they
make thousands of decisions, constantly throughout the season.
Examples would be: given hundreds of species of flowers in bloom,
which shall we sample? Given a source which is sweet but not
producing profusely versus a less sweet but profuse nectar - which
will we work on? Given several hollow trees or caves - which one will
we pick to move the swarm to?

        These are choices that the colony must make. And the fact
that the results are not always unanimous *seems to imply* a process
of group decision making. The foragers will not all go to the same
patch but will exploit multiple patches of flowers. This is important
because some sources will stop producing suddenly, thus working
multiple sources ensures a more constant flow of nectar (Seeley).

        Lindaer reported in 1955 that 2 out of 19 swarms he was
studying broke cluster without reaching a unanimous decision and
tried to depart in two different directions.  Camazine says in 1999:
"In some way the swarm decides its time to take off." If the bee was
working entirely on instinct, the "right" nest would be found and the
colony would simply go there. In a choosing situation a consensus
must be formed.

        I just got done reading Seeley's "Wisdom of the Hive" (1995).
One point I take issue with is when he says:
        "I think it is now clear we can think of a honey bee colony
as a bag of tricks... evolved through natural selection to solve the
various problems faced by the colony. For this reason, it is probably
futile to seek grand principles of colony functioning."

        While it may be true that the hive is basically a machine, I
think it is fatal to assume that it is. There is much in life that we
do not understand and there is much that will always be a mystery.
Science tends toward a reductionist mode of thinking, where all
processes can be explaining by the mechanisms that describe them.
This point of view is not unanimous, however.

        "Knowing how the biological machinery works tells one little
about how to orchestrate that machinery for diverse purposes. To use
an analogy, knowing how a television set produces images in no way
explains the nature of the creative programs it transmits. To switch
the analogical machinery, the software is not reducible to the
hardware. Each is governed by its own set of principles that must be
studied in its own right." Albert Bandura, Professor of Psychology at
Stanford University.

        I think science has done a terrific job in getting to the
bottom of may of life's mysteries. (They've produced their share of
nightmares, too, from gunpowder to nerve gas). Artists and
philosopher's, on the other hand, seek to remind us that life is
*more* than the sum of its parts, that life was *created* somehow
from carbon and water, we may never know how. And I would submit that
one *can* be an artist *and* a scientist, although maybe not at the
same time...




Peter Borst
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many new photos at:
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/plb6/