Bees Function Like a Brain

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"Bees Function Like a Brain

Bees do a quantum dance in order to tell the other members of their hive where to find the honey. Now scientists have discovered that swarms of bees and brains, which are made up of neurons, both make decisions in the same way.

Neurologist Thomas Seeley figured out how scout bees in a honeybee swarm perform "waggle dances" to tell other scout bees to inspect a promising site that has been found. Now he's discovered that scout bees also use inhibitory “stop signals”--a short buzz delivered with a head butt to the dancer-- to inhibit the waggle dances produced by scouts advertising competing sites. In other words, they "break dance" to see whose site wins, since only one site is chosen at a time.

Seely says that such use of stop signals in decision making is “analogous to how the nervous system works in complex brains. The brain has similar cross inhibitory signaling between neurons in decision-making circuits.” In other words, the entire hive sometimes functions the same way a single brain does, producing a "hive mentality."

[Alrai]

I wonder how one site is ultimately chosen when two separate possible sites are proposed. How does one bee who "stop signals" another bee's waggle dance know that their site is better than the one proposed by the bee they headbutted? Do the bees communicate about their respective sites through this dancing and then decide which site is best to pursue as a hive overall? Hm, perhaps it is intriguing how one single organism (or neuron) can determine the best direction for the hive (or brain) overall.