Greetings

While I agree that the discovery that honey bees communicate via
symbolic dances is one of the major discoveries in behavioral biology
in the twentieth century, I would also hand that honor to Tom Seeley's
discovery of "quorum sensing".

On the one hand, foraging bees find many sources of nectar, pollen,
water, etc. and recruit helpers in gathering these substances. There
is usually no reason that all these may be gathered at the same time,
so dances for these various substances can go on simultaneously.

On the other hand, when choosing a nest site there may be multiple
candidates at first, but finally the colony *has to decide* which one
will be the site that they will fly to. The process of selecting the
best site uses a system that mirrors natural selection and can be
readily simulated using a computer program.

> With careful research, Thomas Seeley and his colleagues have uncovered how a swarm comes to a decision. It's not a democracy, exactly, but rather a matter of reaching a threshold as bees endorse a particular site using their "waggle dancing." For a group of about 10,000 bees, several hundred scout out nest sites, but it takes the build-up of just 10 to 20 bees at a site before the swarm starts to move to that location. Through experiments and mathematical modeling, Seeley's group has shown that the bees' method is best at balancing the need to find a home quickly and choosing an ideal nesting site. ( review in American Scientist Magazine )

> The choice of a new home site by a swarm of honeybees is a striking example of group decision-making. When a swarm clusters after leaving its natal colony), scouts search the countryside for cavities with the appropriate volume and other characteristics. They then return to the swarm, and communicate the distance to and direction of the sites they have found with waggle dances, just like those used for communicating locations of food sources in foraging. Usually, the scouts find and report several sites, but in time dances cease for all but one of them, and finally the swarm flies to the selected cavity. Self-organizing processes such as this, in which a complex higher- order pattern (here, the development of a consensus on the best site) arises from relatively simple responses of individuals with no global view of the situation, are receiving increasing attention as biological mechanisms for elaborating complexity. ( Visscher )

See:
How self-organization evolves by P. Kirk Visscher
NATURE | VOL 421 | 20 FEBRUARY 2003 | www.nature.com/nature

Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms by Thomas D. Seeley, P. Kirk
Visscher, Kevin M. Passino
American Scientist Volume: 94 Number: 3 Page: 220 www.americanscientist.org

-- 
Peter L. Borst
Danby, NY  USA
42.35, -76.50

picasaweb.google.com/peterlborst

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