Honeybee Democracy summary

What are bees, anyway? Before we tumble headfirst into the author’s research, like a bee into a crocus flower, let’s go over some fundamentals.

Before bees, there were wasps. It seems that bees evolved from wasps around 100 million years ago, back in the time of the dinosaurs. The key difference between wasps and bees is that bees aren’t carnivorous – they get by exclusively on flower pollen.

The honeybees will hang patiently from their tree branch for anywhere between a few hours and a few days. They certainly won’t rush into a decision about where to go – it’s much too important for that. If they get the wrong site, the colony may well not make it through the winter.

But just what sort of site are they looking for? What is it that makes an ideal home for honeybees?

There are lots of different forms of democracy. Human politics tends to be organized around representative democracy, in which individuals make decisions on the population’s behalf. Honeybees, however, use a model closer to direct democracy: a system where many individuals make decisions directly.

The decision-making bees aren’t the entire swarm but several hundred experienced worker bees known as scout bees. These are the bees that fly out and evaluate potential nest sites.

Returning to Appledore Island, the author devised an experiment to find out how often bees choose the best available nest site. He positioned five boxes around the island, deliberately making one box ideal, and four only acceptable. He then encouraged five different swarms, one at a time, to choose a new home.

Four out of the five swarms opted for the ideal site. Not a perfect score, but certainly proof that honeybees are skilled when it comes to making the correct decision.

Unless something unusual happens, one potential new nest site will eventually gain enough support that the bees are ready to move in. But what then?

How exactly does a swarm of some 10,000 bees, hanging out on a tree branch, suddenly realize it’s time to move to a new home? And how exactly does the swarm get there? After all, only the scout bees have been to the site – and not even all of them.

A swarm of bees, as we’ve already mentioned, is a bit like a single organism. More specifically, it can be likened to a large, buzzing brain – it really does work in a similar way. An individual bee is much like a neuron, in that it plays a small but vital part in gathering and processing information so that decisions can be made.

But from a different perspective, bees can also be likened to people. In fact, as the author has found, the honeybees’ decision-making process could actually help us to make better collective decisions.