Beehive as a Brain

Much like neurons in a brain, individual bees may provoke or inhibit the response of an entire swarm

It is an analogy that has been suggested before—how, in social insects such as bees and ants, the entire hive or colony acts as one organism. But recent work on bees suggests that this may be more than just an analogy. Researchers studying the formation of new hives in bees have found decision making mechanisms very similar to those encountered in complex brains, with individual bees playing the part of excitatory or inhibitory neurons.

Normally, as a hive grows beyond a certain size, a swarm splits and sets off to form a new hive. But before the swarm leaves, scout bees set out to search for suitable sites. On their return, they communicate this information through an elaborate dance, which involves a figure-of-eight pattern that through its size and orientation conveys both the distance and direction to the site. Other scouts then set off to the same site, return and repeat the dance. Each scout dance acts as an excitatory mechanism to set off more dances, and when the numbers of dancers reaches a certain quorum, the swarm decides to leave the hive and set off for the new site.

In this process, what was not clear was how a swarm resolves the quandary that arises when scouts detect two or more suitable sites. Studying this question, P Kirk Visscher at University of California, Riverside, and Thomas Seeley at Cornell University, NY, found another signal that plays a role in this process— a short buzz delivered by the sender scout while butting her head against a dancer advertising an alternate site.

“It appears that the stop signals in bee swarms serve the same purpose as the inhibitory connections in the brains of monkeys deciding how to move their eyes in response to visual input,” said Visscher, a professor of entomology, “In one case, we have bees, and in the other, we have neurons that suppress the activity levels of units—dancing bees or nerve centres—that are representing different alternatives. Bee behaviour can shed some light on general issues of decision making. Bees are a lot bigger than neurons for sure, and may be easier to study.”

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