A new article by Tom Seeley shows the highly intelligent decision making
processes bees use in the selection of new nest sites. The various sites are
evaluated until agreement arises and the swarm can then go to the best site.
It is not a matter of a few bees picking the first site they find, but many
sites are found and lobbied for.

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A feature of the bees' behavior that promotes their collective intelligence
is that the scouts show no tendency toward conformity or slavish imitation
of others as they contribute to the decision-making process. We have
explained that the heart of this process is a competition among the various
coalitions of scouts affiliated with different sites, each one vying to
attract uncommitted scouts to her site. The members of each coalition
recruit additional members by performing waggle dances that vary in strength
in relation to site quality, so that the higher the site quality, the
stronger the waggle dance and the greater the stream of newcomers. What is
critically important here is that when an uncommitted scout is recruited to
a site, she does not blindly support the bee whose dance she followed.
Instead, she examines the advertised site herself, and only if she too
judges it to be a worthy site does she perform a dance for it and thereby
recruit still more bees to the site. Through this independence of opinions,
the scouts avoid propagating errors in the assessments of sites. Only at a
truly good site will dancers attract more dancers, hence will there be a
strong addition to the number of scout bees at the site. The net result is
that scout bees avoid mass manias over poor options.

The third key to the swarm's success is how the quorum-sensing process
aggregates the diverse and independent opinions of the scouts in a way that
balances the competing needs of decision-making accuracy and speed. The
quorum level is high enough that many bees must independently assess a
site's quality before it is chosen. Quick selection of a home based on only
one or a few bees' favorable assessments is not possible. The quorum-sensing
process filters out extreme or inaccurate opinions and provides a balanced,
group-level assessment of the chosen site. This assessment process takes
time but ensures that there is enough of an interval for true diversity of
opinion to arise and for discovered sites to be independently evaluated
before one of them is chosen. Thus, 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.

http://www.americanscientist.org

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