Bees Form Better Democracy

Bees Form Better Democracy
By Robin Lloyd
Special to LiveScience
posted: 02 May 2006
09:05 am ET


Take it from bees. Intense competition is better than touchy-feely "win-win" negotiations when it comes to making big decisions.

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A better democracy

If humans were to take a page from honeybee home hunting, we too could learn to minimize bad decisions, he said.

"How the scout bees select candidate sites, deliberate among choices and reach a verdict is a process complicated enough to rival the dealings of any corporate committee," Seeley wrote in a recent article in American Scientist magazine summarizing his research.

Seeley and his colleague, Kirk Visscher of the University of California-Riverside, tagged, observed, videotaped and experimented with swarms of up to 10,000 honeybees at Appledore Island in the Gulf of Maine. The setting has few trees, which allows Seeley and Visscher to set up test homes (boxes) from which the bees can choose.

Here is what they found: When bees outgrow their hives, a few hundred scouts selected by the queen search for the perfect, new location for a swarm—a south-facing knothole that is smaller than 4.7 square inches, perched several yards above the ground and leads to a hollow in the tree that is at least 5 gallons in volume.

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060502_bee_decision.html

A lot more on the mechanics of all this at the link. Pretty interesting stuff.

Dr Seeley may be a fine biologist, but he's no great shakes as a political scientist. Bee society is rigidly hierarchical, and there is one absolute ruler of a beehive -- the queen. Dr Seeley says that the queen selects the scouts that go out in search of a new hive. When they return, some other bees make a quick decision on a new hive, "instead of hashing it out endlessly". He says that there is an "open forum for questions and a decentralized, competitive 'debate' that filters out extreme or inaccurate opinions". The quotation marks around "debate" are the author's, and they're appropriate; the bees are just communicating information for the most part, with not a lot of room for "extreme or inaccurate opinions". Mind you, are bees even capable of having "opinions" per se?

The piece closes with this section that suggests how either the author or Dr Seeley may define and view democracy: "Americans value democracy, or at least a representative version of it. Honeybees have evolved to rely on this quorum or majority method to collect independent opinions, something that differs from a one-man, one-vote democracy or an agonizing attempt to hammer out something everyone agrees upon. It's a faster route to a swift and also smart decision, Seeley said." So apparently expediency is a major part of democracy.

At least on the surface, it sounds like a good model not so much for a democratic institution as for a corporation looking to relocate, and we all know just how democratic corporations are.