Democracy

Honeybee Democracy is a good read in an election year. With Republican Primaries dragging on and on with a murky outlook, low opinion ratings of most national politicians, and campaigns feeding our public knowledge of who is correct or incorrect, it is difficult to truly distinguish the facts from the fallacies. Recently the Obama campaign released a minute long video highlighting speeches by Mitt Romney that called Obama out for failing to do certain things or for making bad decisions, and then countering each argument with clips from speeches made by Obama on the same topic. With an inundation of rhetoric from all sides, the average American can hardly figure out who is correct.

With honey bees, the answer is a bit simpler. Once quorum is reached in favor of a particular option in a house hunt, the bees can collectively decide that that is the correct choice. Scout bees listen to the input of their fellows and follow their lead to fact-check fellow scouts when they say that they have found a suitable home. This system of fact-checking reinforcing good decisions and negating poor decisions, while obviously much easier for a honey bee making a less complex decision than that of a President, seems to have been lost in politics. Increasingly, accusations are made and claims of success are similarly thrown about, but little fact-checking is available without some digging. Our would-be scout bees, the media, is drawn into the fray and is often biased. The bees rely on trust of their fellow’s collective judgments; Americans tend not to rely on this same trust-based system of support in decision making.

Collective needs are what cause bees to be able to work together so well. Trust is something that is not so easy for humans, despite having collective goods as well.