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 [log in to unmask] many new photos at: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/plb6/