Book of the Week: Honeybee Democracy
01 Nov 2015
This week I read Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley after it was mentioned in Simple Rules. This book is about how honeybees make decisions when they swarm.
Bees, with their hairy bodies and fixation on flowers as protein sources, serve as flying penises for the plants, picking up pollen grains from the bursting anthers of one flower and depositing them on the sticky stigma of another.
Bees serve a very important role in the production of food. Without bees, we wouldn’t have any almonds to eat. I’m fascinated by how people leverage the bees for pollinating crops and harvesting honey. Life Cycle of Honeybee Colonies [caption id=”attachment_3559” align=”alignnone” width=”681”]
Honeybee Democracy Life Cycle Diagram[/caption] As the bees increase in number, eventually daughter queens are born. This induces the Mother queen to swarm with part of the hive to find a new home. This cycle can repeat with the daughter queen, but eventually multiple queens pop out and fight each for survival. The last one standing inherits the parental nest. Most of the book covers that happens with the swarm. Nest Preferences Property | Perfence | Function
—|—|—
Size of entrance | 12.5 > 75 cm2 | Colony defense and thermoregulation
Direction of entrance | South > north facing | Colony thermoregulation
Height of entrance | 5 > 1 m | Colony defense
Position of entrance | Bottom > top of cavity | Colony thermoregulation
Shape of entrance | Circle = vertical slit | None
Volume of cavity | 10 < 40 < 100 liters | Storage space for honey and colony thermoregulation
Combs in cavity | With > without | Economy in nest construction
Shape of cavity | Cubical = tall | None
Dryness of cavity | Wet = dry | Bees can waterproof a leaky cavity
Draftiness of cavity | Drafty = tight | Bees can caulk cracks and holes
A > B, denotes A is preferred to B; A = B denotes no preference between A and B. They determined nest-site preferences by constructing artificial cavities with varying properties and seeing which homes they picked. Bees prefer cavities that are high up, with small entrances at the bottom on the south-facing side with existing comb with a cavity size around 40 liters. Now you have the information to build the perfect bee home. If there is exiting comb, they don’t have to expend energy creating new comb. I think the south-facing requirement is for hives in the northern hemisphere. The scouting bees estimate the size of the cavity by using the mean free path length, the distance they can travel without running into a wall. They figured this out by tricking bees with a rotating tube that acted like a bee treadmill. Chemical Warfare The secretary of state during the Reagan administration accused the Soviet Union o fusing chemical weapons in Laos and Kampuchea, but it turned out that the “yellow rain” was just bee poop. Queen Pheromone [caption id=”attachment_3560” align=”aligncenter” width=”250”]
(E)-9-Oxodec-2-enoic acid[/caption] (E)-9-Oxodec-2-enoic acid is an indicator of a queen’s presence. If the bees no longer sense it when they swarm, it means, they need to stop, because they lost their queen. Swarming Process Scouts are sent to to identify possible nesting spots. They come back and do a waggle dance to let the other bees know by moving around in figure-eights. The direction of the dance indicates where the location is relative to the sun. The duration of the waggles indicate how far away the location is. The quality is judged in an absolute sense by the scout and is indicated by how many dances per second and how many dances in total. High quality sites will have more dances. As more bees see the dance, they will check out the site and return with their report in the form of a waggle dance. Eventually quorum is reached when you have a lot of bees waggle dancing to the same site. To help achieve quorum, each time a bee dances for the same spot, it will do less dance circuits each time. This causes a decay in interest in the site. If the site is actually a good site, there should be other bees also dancing for that site and the original scout can rest. Eventually the swarm decides on a new home and takes off with scouts flying fast as the guides. AdversaryDemocracy Versus Unitary Democracy In an adversary democracy, the individuals have conflicting interest and difference preferences. In contrast, a unitary democracy involves individuals with shared interests and preferences. Bees are unitary while humans are adversarial. 5 Habits of Highly Effective Groups
- Compose the Decision-Making Group of Individuals with Shared Interest and Mutual Respect
- Minimize the Leader’s Influence on the Group’s Thinking
- Seek Diverse Solutions to the Problem
- Aggregate the Group’s Knowledge through Debate
- Use Quorum Responses for Cohesion, Accuracy, and Speed
Seeley presents lessons that we humans can learn from bees in making the best decisions. The selection of a nest-site means life or death for a hive, so great care is taken to come to the best possible choice. Resources
Purchase Honeybee Democracy on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.