PI: Seeley Proposal Number: 9630159 The goal of this project is to elucidate the mechanisms underlying one of the most impressive examples of group decision making in animals: the selection of a new nest site by swarms of honey bees. The bees' methods of choice enable the several hundred scout bees in a swarm to reach a consensus about a future dwelling place with both speed and accuracy. Understanding how the members of a honey bee colony form an effective decision-making unit may well have practical applications, for we humans also often function as members of a group responsible for making decisions with important consequences. Prior studies of nest-site selection by honey bee swarms have concentrated on determining the bees' criteria of choice (what they base their decision on). This study will focus on the bees' methods of choice (how they form their decision). In particular, the bees' process of consensus building will be analyzed. Among other things, this will involve following the actions of scout bees labeled for individual identification and noting how each scout bee adjusts her behavior as a function of the quality of the nest site that she has found. Somehow, the bees that have located sites that are less than the best must become aware of this and then switch their "allegiance" to the best site. This investigation is likely to reveal that none of the scout bees possesses a synoptic knowledge of the various alternatives under consideration in the decision-making process. Instead, what seems most likely is that each bee functions merely as one small part of a group-level unit in which the tasks of generating, evaluating, and choosing among alternatives are accomplished collectively. Thus this study will provide a strong example of an important idea in sociobiology: that the members of a group, by working together cooperatively, can form a group-level
