Informational cascades in honeybee’s swarming behavior
In lecture, we discuss about information cascade, which describes how individuals makes decisions based on not their well being but on the decisions of others, thereby neglecting what truly matters. However, this definition is simply an applied definition since every “social interactions are never just person-to-person, but instead, every agent interacting with another might bring her or his wider set of group memberships along this interpersonal mixture.” A better way to see information cascade is to view it as a sort of hierarchical structure in which different parts behave not just in response to local events in their immediate surrounding but also in response to larger events and changes.
This article speaks about how honeybee’s behavioral patterns and communication patterns for information sharing, such as swarming and decision making, can be interpreted as an multifractal information cascade process. An example the article gave was when a group of bees decide to abandon their old hive, they go and scout for information on a new viable site for a new hive. Upon return, they communicate the collected information amongst each other and the bees, “without apparent social pressure to conform independent vote on their own.” When they reach a certain number of positive votes, the bees make their decision to swarm without waiting for a unanimous endorsement.
According to the article, honeybees’ behavior pattern are notoriously hard to study and there are many unique qualities to their group behavior. This leads to many research and studies about the dynamics of honey bee populations, namely the Carver and Kelty-Stephen’s study, which “identify the mathematical signatures of cascading behaviour seen in the observations of movement of bees in five observed experimental hives over a period of 5-7 weeks.
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Informational-cascades-in-honeybee-swarming-behaviour/article17288716.ece