Honeybee Democracy

2008, created with his studies of the house-hunting bees in the 1950s. I wish to dedicate this book to Martin Lindauer, my friend and teacher, whose pioneering investigations inspired my own explorations of the Wonderland of the Bees Society. Tom Seeley Ithaca, New York 1. INTRODUCTION Go to the bee, thou poet. Consider her ways, and be wise. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903 Honey bees are sweetness and light, producers of honey and beeswax, so it is no great wonder that humans have prized these small creatures since ancient times. Even today, when rich sweets and bright lights are commonplace, we humans continue to treasure these hard-working insects, especially the 200 billion or so that live in partnership with commercial beekeepers and perform on our behalf a critical agricultural mission. Go forth and pollinate. In North America, the managed honey bees are the primary pollinators for some 50 fruit and vegetable crops, which together form the most nutritious portion of our daily diet. But honey bees also provide us another great gift, one that feeds our brains rather than our bellies, for inside each teeming beehive is an exemplar of a community whose members succeed in working together to achieve shared goals. We will see that these little six-legged beauties have something to teach us about building smoothly functioning groups, especially ones capable of exploiting fully the power of democratic decision-making. Our lessons will come from just one species of honey bee, Apis mellifera, the best-known insect on the planet. Originally native to Western Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, it is now found in temperate and tropical regions throughout the world thanks to the dispersal efforts of its human admirers. It is a bee that is beautifully social. We can see this beauty in their nests of golden combs, those exquisite arrays of hexagonal cells sculpted of thinnest beeswax. We can see it further in their harmonious societies, wherein tens of thousands of worker bees, through enlightened self-interest, cooperate to serve a colony's common good. And in this book we will see the social beauty of honey bees vividly and in fine detail by examining how a colony achieves near-perfect accuracy when it selects its home. Choosing the right dwelling place is a life-or-death matter for a honey bee colony. If a colony chooses poorly and so occupies a nest cavity that is too small to hold the honey stores it needs to survive winter, or that provides it with poor protection from cold winds and hungry marauders, then it will die. Given the vital importance of choosing a suitably roomy and snug home site, it is not surprising that a colony's choice of its living quarters is made not by a few bees acting alone, but by several hundred bees acting collectively. This book is about how this sizable search committee almost always makes a good choice. We will uncover the means by which these house-hunting bees scour the neighborhood for potential nest sites, report the news of their discoveries, conduct a frank debate about these options, and ultimately reach an agreement about which site will be their colony's new dwelling place. In short, we will examine the ingenious workings of honey bee democracy. There is one common misunderstanding about the inner operations of a honey bee colony that I must dispel at the outset. Namely, that a colony is governed by a benevolent dictator, Her Majesty the Queen. The belief that a colony's coherence derives from an omniscient queen or king, telling the workers what to do, is centuries old, tracing back to Aristotle and persisting until modern times. But it is false. What is true is that a colony's queen lies at the heart of the whole operation, for a honey bee colony is an immense family consisting of the mother queen and her thousands of progeny. It is also true that the many thousands of attentive daughters, the workers, of the mother queen are, ultimately, all striving to promote her survival and reproduction. Nevertheless, a colony's queen is not the royal decider. Rather, she is the royal ovipositor. Each summer day, she manifests herself as