On Wed, 7 Mar 2007 12:25:20 EST, Don Cole <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> the DL hypothesis has been the ruling theory, "case closed". 

Actually, people like Tom Seeley are still studying it and modifying it as
needed. He has found not only do bees communicate about potential nest
sites, the "vote" on them.

see:
"Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms: When 10,000 bees go house
hunting, how do they cooperatively choose their new nesting site?"
by Thomas D. Seeley, P. Kirk Visscher, Kevin M. Passino

quote:
"the quorum-sensing method of aggregating the bees' information allows
diversity and independence of opinion to thrive, but only long enough to
ensure that a decision error is improbable. These considerations illustrate
how the study of group decision making by honey bees might help human groups
achieve collective intelligence and thus avoid collective folly. Good group
decisions, the bees show us, can be fostered by endowing a group with three
key habits: structuring each deliberation as an open competition of ideas,
promoting diversity of knowledge and independence of opinions among a
group's members and aggregating the opinions in a way that meets time
constraints yet wisely exploits the breadth of knowledge within the group."

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