> they may be able to gauge the amount of time elapsed since the previous spring and aim for the following one ...
> Only bee that lives long enough to do that would bee the queen.

Hi all
Anyone who has been following along should be able to anticipate the next step:

> The field of collective animal behaviour examines how relatively simple, local interactions between individuals in groups combine to produce global-level outcomes. We argue that feedback between collective performance and learning – giving the former the capacity to become an adaptive, and potentially cumulative, process – is a currently poorly explored but crucial mechanism in understanding collective systems. We synthesise material ranging from swarm intelligence in social insects through collective movements in vertebrates to collective decision making in animal and human groups, to propose avenues for future research to identify the potential for changes in these systems to accumulate over time.

> We have highlighted a hitherto largely overlooked aspect of collective animal behaviour: that many collective outcomes we observe and study at a given time might be contingent on the collective's previous history and memory. There is evidence that collective performance – measured in terms of the speed and accuracy of group decisions, group cohesion, and/or energetic efficiency – can change over time, both in groups where the same members solve the same task repeatedly and in those that experience at least partial turnovers in group membership over the course of such repetition.

> Key to our argument is that if collective learning not only influences individual knowledge but also has the potential to affect how future collective decisions are made, we must acknowledge collective behaviour as a flexible process and explore its capacity to adapt using feedback from the group's prior performance. 

Biro, D., Sasaki, T., & Portugal, S. J. (2016). Bringing a time–depth perspective to collective animal behaviour. Trends in ecology & evolution, 31(7), 550-562.

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