How Bees, Ants, and Other Animals Ace Group Decision-Making

This Susan charachature has issues when she makes a concerted effort to inject "hers and his" to her observation.

This leads to another observation of "colonies." All males, males and females, or just females. Or should I have said Al females, females and males, or only females??

I have worked in many manufacturing plants over the years where many adults spend more of the waking hours with each other than with their families.

It is not so much how they interact or interfere with each other at the tasks at hand (hence just doing bee things)but more of seeing how they behave with the idle time within the groups.

Watch how problems like their immediate job, families and outside purchases are discussed and what is resolved or determined.

It is absolutely fascinating and I am no behavior scientist!

These groups come together to feed this "queen" from various communities. How they manage to get their "bee duties" done is a science in itself.

Watch how outside interferences influence the mood of the hive. If a new Walmart or "queen" is looking to build nearby then all of a sudden you have small groups buzzing about what is right or wrong about it and how it will affect them.Then they tend to gang up against the need for the Walmart but will end up shopping there in the end. They stay with the "queen."

Take an internal influence like "the company" telling them how things are going to change, good or bad, and the hive begins to buzz into little groups looking for sympathetic alliances.

If a union is in place they seek solice to attack their own "queen." If no union is in place then some will leave the "queen" if it is not what they want in the end.

So a centralized plan (union membership) does work better even if the "queen" would like to eliminate the collective alliance in this case. "She" is still taken care of in the end.

rd1160 of GA 1:16PM May 20, 2009

Do bees and ant colonies have freeloaders? You know, is there a big chunk that slough off work because they know the workers will feed them anyway? Do they stand in little unemployment lines, or work anyway, because they're driven to do it?

Point being - humans are not a hive of insects. We have different motives and rewards. While each may be interesting to study in its own right, they are not even remotely comparable (even if it's kind of a fun analogy).

Try taking a few million chimpanzees, throwing them into the same few square miles of territory and see what happens. Humans have done pretty well, considering we're not built to live in colonies of millions.

Rich of CO 6:28PM May 15, 2009