Anderson - Bee Wise

Mike LAnderson

Published bySmashwords

Copyright 2014Mike L Anderson

ISBN9781310051524

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personalenjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away toother people. If you would like to share this book with anotherperson, please purchase an additional copy for each person. Ifyoure reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was notpurchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.comand purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard workof this author.

Unlessotherwise stated, quotations from the Bible are taken from HolyBible: New International Version, Copyright 1978 by theInternational Bible Society, New York.

Cover photograph: by Heike Frohnhoff

To conservetrees, please try to avoid printing this document.

Dedication

This book isdedicated to all my prayer and financial supporters.

Acknowledgements

A big thank-you to theeditors, Dr Andrew Potts and Rachel Anderson

Table of Contents

You have tomove home. You only have a few days to do it. There are a dozenplaces to choose from and you have six criteria to consider. Oh,and your ten thousand kids all have to agree. Good luck.

Honey bees haveto solve this kind of problem routinely. If they don't get it rightthe colony may well perish. We need them to get it right becausethey are Gods instruments in providing us with almost a third ofour food crops through pollination. How do such little creaturesmanage this without even a second thought? And without a firstthought either. Individual bees are pretty stupid.

The answer issuch a wonder that you may well have great difficulty believing me.However, researchers have very thoroughly and laboriouslyinvestigated the matter. So, what I tell you is sober fact. Beeshave evolved a strategy over many millions of years of evolutionthat enables them to get around their limitations and solvesproblems that are just too complex for them to solve individually.And, as we shall see, they do it in a quite remarkable way. The strategy isalso divine. God, in his humility, used a similar strategy withJesus on the cross. Could we learn something from Jesus and hisbees about how to deal with such complex problems as climatechange? This book shows that we can and how we can.

Miller puts itthis way. "As everyday life grows more complicated, we increasinglyfind ourselves facing the same problems of uncertainty, complexity,and change, drowning in too much information, bombarded with toomuch instant feedback, facing too many interconnected decisions.Whether we realize it or not, we too are caught up in worlds ofcollective phenomena that make it more difficult than ever to guideour companies, communities, and families with confidence. Thesechallenges are already upon us, so we need to beprepared." Perhaps we can learn somethingfrom social insects? Actually, we already have. Social insects havecome under intense scrutiny recently and are giving up theirsecrets. People are using these secrets to deal very successfullywith complex and previously intractable problems in such disparatefields as telecommunications, computer network security and airlineproduction. Miller even suggests that the best way to solve bigcomplex problems is to "turn to the experts - not the ones on cableTV but those in the grass, in the air, in the lakes, and in thewoods." So, how do bees do it and how can humans apply theprinciples? Here is a simplified picture of how it works:

*****

Get knowledgefrom many independent experts

Hundreds ofnest-site scouts (about five percent of the colony) independentlysearch for sites and when they find a promising one, they return tolet the other scouts know. They consider nest-site size, location,how sheltered it is and so on. The first principle in bee wisdom isto get knowledge from many independent experts. Finding the bestnest-site is just too big a problem for an intellectuallychallenged scout to solve individually. The principle is echoed inProverbs, For lack of guidance a nation falls, but many advisersmake victory sure. Thescout uses a "waggle dance" to tell the hive the location of a nestsite or food source (see accompanying figure). The angle of thewaggle run to the vertical indicates the direction of the nest-siterelative to the path of the sun; the duration of the waggle runindicates the distance and the number of dances how great theythought the site was.

A waggle run oriented 45 to the right of up on thevertical comb indicates a food source 45 to the right of thedirection of the sun outside the hive.

Let ideascompete with each other based on how well they match up with theevidence.

Some scoutswill check out sites reported by others. If they concur they willalso do a waggle-dance for the site. Researchers report that whatis critically important here is that when an uncommitted scout isrecruited to a site, she does not blindly support the bee whosedance she followed. Instead, she examines the advertised site herself, and only if she too judges it to be a worthy site does sheperform a dance for it and thereby recruit still more bees to thesite. There are no false scouts inbee communities (they are impeccably honest) and scouts are alwayssceptical of other scout reports. So, there is no chance that thecolony will follow a rumour mill. The second principle is to letideas compete with each other based on how well they match up withthe evidence. Eventually, one site will get danced for more oftenthan other sites and will edge out the competition. That site willbecome the location for the new hive.

Combinescepticism and trust through an appropriate division of labour

Non-scouts beeshave an important role do nothing - that is nothing scoutrelated. Instead, they stick to keeping the current hive and hometogether. This frees the scouts to specialise on their job. Whereas scouts willnever just follow another scout to a new nest site, non-scoutsalways do. However, it is not a blind following. Workertrust is always based on a specific quorum of scoutopinion never on the view of a few celebrity bees or the majorityconsensus of non-scout opinion.Indeed, not even the queen decrees where the colony will live, butkeeps to her role as reproducer and lets the scouts decide on thenest site. Non-scouts accept the judgement of the scouts and followthem to the new nest site. It is too costly and impractical foreach and every member of the colony to investigate all possiblesites.

Investigatingpotential hive sites is not done by just any worker. Scepticism isleft to scouts based on their age, experience and genes. There areno workers that dismiss scout opinion (though they have nevervisited a potential nest site). Naive scepticism just does notexist in the hive. The hive tacitly admits that it takes knowledgeto be effectively sceptical. Notice that the colony as a wholeneither champions mere scepticism nor mere trust. Nature has giventhem, instead, the right mix of independence andinterdependence. Tom Seeley, the renowned beeexpert, says, what I find most noteworthy about a swarms skill indecision making is how it arises from a truly ingenious balancebetween interdependence and independence

Bees illustrate both the wisdom of scepticism but also thefoolhardiness of making mere scepticism fundamental for all beesfor all matters. Individual bees are just not smart enough and donot live long enough to be sceptical about everything. Worker beeshave less than a million neurons in theirbrain