NYT: How Bees Make a Decision

By JAMES GORMAN

When it comes to bees making decisions, my question is whether the bee or the hive is the individual. I didn't come up with this question out of the blue, although the blue is actually where most of my ideas come from. The blue is one of my best sources. This question, however, came from reading American Scientist. In the current issue there's an article titled "Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms," by Thomas D. Seeley of Cornell, P. Kirk Visscher at the University of California, Riverside, and Kevin M. Passino at Ohio State.

After Dr. Seeley and colleagues present their findings — which I'll get to — they suggest that humans could learn something about group decision making from the bees. The bees, it seems, almost always make good decisions. Groups of humans have a bit more trouble, or as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in "Beyond Good and Evil," according to the article, "Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups."

Dr. Seeley is a bit more cheery than Nietzsche. I suppose that's not a very high bar, but he writes that groups can make good decisions, and that the success of bees could offer humans some guidance. Here's how the honeybees do it. When hives of honeybees get too big, they split up. The old queen flies off with a retinue of 10,000 bees or so — a swarm. Over the course of several days, as the swarm waits clustered together on a tree branch, scout bees search for real estate and come back to do waggle dances to promote their finds.

Scouts can be recruited from one site to a better one and start dancing for it. Eventually, agreement is reached, and by the time the swarm is ready to fly the scouts are unified in leading the swarm to a new home. How do the bees decide? By consensus? Voting? After several experiments, the researchers concluded that the swarm does not wait for consensus. It senses when there are enough scouts concentrating on one site — a "quorum" of 15 to 20 — and that's when the bees get ready to move. As they warm up their flight muscles for an hour or so, the rest of the scouts usually come around to supporting the best site, so a consensus is achieved before flight.

What's good about this process, the authors say, is that autonomous individuals gather information and present a wide range of knowledge in the open marketplace of waggle dancing. Dr. Seeley writes that the study of how bees decide things could "help human groups achieve collective intelligence and avoid collective folly."

Maybe. Much as I would like to see the waggle dance replace the roll call Congress (Senator Kennedy and Senator Lott in the aisles?), I can't help wondering whether a hive finding a hollow tree isn't more like me buying a TV than it is like a government deciding on war, taxes or prayer in schools. Unlike members of Congress, individual bees all want the same thing. Individual bees don't seem to have different religions, different views on a social system in which a lot of them don't ever get to have sex or different taste in music. No bee lobbyists have yet been identified.

From my point of view, as a voter and a shopper, I think a swarm is like a single person. I don't know about everybody else, but when I'm shopping for something, let's say a TV, and I'm having trouble deciding, my head feels a lot like a swarm of bees. I read the consumer advice, I look at Web sites, I try to figure out what HDTV really is, I fill my head with prices, taxes, delivery costs, reliability of online stores — until the neurological waggle dancing of different opinions in my mind becomes almost intolerable.

Then, out of the blue, or so I used to think, comes the thought that I should just stop it and buy one. Maybe my brain has actually sensed a quorum of ideas, or neurons or electrical impulses all pointing to the huge screen with 0 percent interest until 2008. Or maybe not. Bees make the right decisions, and they don't use credit.