Honeybee Democracy

The house-hunting honeybees show us a clever way for a decision-making group to make an accurate consensus decision and also save some time. Their trick is to have the scout bees make quorum responses, that is, to have these bees make sharp changes in their behavior when a threshold number (quorum) of individuals support one of the alternatives.

Lesson 5: Use Quorum Responses for Cohesion, Accuracy, and Speed

third, we recognize that while it is important for a group’s members to listen to what everyone else is saying, it is essential that they listen critically, form their own opinions about the options being discussed, and register their views independently.

Second, we foster good communication within the debating group, recognizing that this is how valuable information that is uncovered by one member will quickly reach the other members.

Thus the scout bees make use of the power of communication to help good ideas spread while at the same time they avoid the risk of creating an information cascade about an inferior site. By evaluating sites independently, they invest their attention wisely.

How can humans use what the bees have demonstrated about aggregating the knowledge and opinions of a group’s members to make good choices for the group as a whole? I suggest three things. First, we use the power of an open and fair competition of ideas, in the form of a frank debate, to integrate the information that is dispersed among the group’s

No scout bee, not even one that has encountered a wildly exuberant dancer, will blindly follow another scout’s opinion by dancing for a site she has not inspected. This is critical.

the heart of the bees’ decision-making process is a turbulent debate among groups of scout bees supporting different options (potential nest sites). These groups compete to gain additional members from a pool of scout bees who are not yet committed to a site. Whichever group first attracts a quorum of supporters wins the competition. The winning gr

a nifty rule that helps ensure that every participant at the town meeting gets to express his or her thoughts on each issue; no one may speak more than twice on a particular issue until everyone who wants to speak on the issue has had an opportunity to do so once.