Crowd-Sourced Decision Making: A Honeybee’s Perspective
Among the professors here at Cornell, one biologist, Thomas Seeley, is world-renowned in his knowledge on the subject of honeybees. One particular event in the lives of bees that Professor Seeley has studied is the act of swarming. Swarming occurs in a hive when a new queen is introduced into the colony. The bees will likely swarm, which means that they will collectively leave and rebuild their home somewhere else, whether it be a tree branch, a tree cavity, or even a hole in one’s own home. This seems like a rather simple task, just fly away until the swarm lands upon a suitable host, but quite the opposite occurs. The bees will send out a few scouts, who will search the nearby areas (within a range of a couple of miles).
This is all well and good until you realize that these are honeybees, how do they decide which location to fly to? Which scout gets the final say? Why choose the rafters of a barn instead of the hollow tree stump? The answer to this question, as Professor Seeley has discovered, is that the scouts will return to the hive with the intention of getting other bees in on their campaign to choose the spot that they found. Based on the scout’s judgment of the suitability of the location in question, the scout will do a dance within the hive, directing other bees towards the new real estate to get their opinion of the new location. The better the location, the more time the scout will spend repeating their dance to enlist other opinions. Once the bees that went to look at the potential new home, they also return and will do their dance directing others to the site, repeating the dance more and more depending on their presumed quality of the site. Eventually, once the bees either slowly stop dancing about a mediocre site and there are a significant number of bees promoting the best option, they will begin to swarm.
This sort of democratic decision is a complex network of social interaction akin to several of the networks that we have discussed in class. Besides the basic role of searching, with continual refinement as different waves of bees go out to judge potential sites, they return to submit their vote. The vote for one site is then weighted based on the quality of the site, which can be attributed to the number of bees still dancing about it. For a poor site, the initial scout will stop dancing much sooner than a scout that has found a good site, so the number of bees “linked” to that site will be fewer than those dancing about a quality site, after several bees have gone to each of the sites. Slowly, the network of bees knowing about the preferred site will grow and eventually the bees will reach a consensus, or a sort of equilibrium. Based on the quality of these sites, there is a mutual benefit of choosing the best site for the new hive. While some bees will continue to vie for a suboptimal site after a scout has informed them about it, the hive will continue to “refresh” until almost all of the bees have reached the equilibrium of the best possible home. For those of you wanting to learn more, Professor Seeley has written a few books about honeybees, especially his most recent book of the title Honeybee Democracy.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-secret-life-of-bees-99559587/?all