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Article: Swarm savvy: how bees, ants and other animals avoid dumb collective decisions.
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- May 9, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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This is a phone conversation, so if Tom Seeley rolls his eyes, that's his business. He's a distinguished behavioral biologist, full professor at Cornell University, member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and so on. Yet he takes it pretty well when asked whether honeybees could have had a real estate crisis and crashed their banking system.
Seeley, at least voice-wise, stays polite and treats this as a serious question. Which it is.
Of course honeybees don't have a banking system, but they do exhibit collective behavior. The queen bee doesn't decide what the colony needs to do. Instead, each colony member does her or his bee thing, and out of ...