Nature's Secret: Why Honey Bees Are

Better Politicians Than Humans

NPR by Author Interviews May 24, 2011
MARY LOUISE KELLY, host:
This is the moving season. Kids are leaving college. Families are taking vacations. And if you
look in your backyard, you may see some bees hunting for real estate.
Here's NPR's science correspondent Robert Krulwich.
ROBERT KRULWICH: It starts with a hum. You might hear it in the woods, maybe in your
backyard.
(Soundbite of bees)
KRULWICH: In springtime, says Cornell Professor Tom Seeley, a beehive gets very
crowded. So, often, a bunch of bees will split off, led by the queen, and the first thing they're
going to need is a new home. So they've got to choose one. But how they choose, that's the
big surprise. It turns out that bees vote. And Tom Seeley has figured out how they do it.
Professor THOMAS SEELEY (Cornell University): They fly out of the parental hive, and it's
a mass exodus. And then they reassemble. Once they're outside, they assemble themselves
into a beard-like cluster. It's about the size of a soccer ball.
KRULWICH: A beard-like cluster? So that means that they look like a beard?
PROF. SEELEY: Yeah. If Santa Claus had a dark brown beard, that's what it would look like.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PROF. SEELEY: It hangs from a tree branch, and it kind of sways around a little bit like a
beard would blow around.
KRULWICH: And when they're swarming, at this point, they're gentle, right? They don't
sting you if you were to try to touch them.
PROF. SEELEY: Yes. You can put you - you can go up to them. You can put your finger in
the cluster and feel how warm it is inside. You do all sorts of stuff, like you can even do
scientific investigations of them.
KRULWICH: Okay. So let us ask: What are the bees now looking for? Well, Tom says, they
need a hole in a tree high off the ground, lots of space inside, narrow opening, facing in the
right direction.

PROF. SEELEY: So they've got a real problem. Finding first-rate living quarters is not easy
for honey bees.
KRULWICH: And it turns out, they don't have any, you know, bee instinct that says: Here's
the place. The queen is not involved at all. Instead...
PROF. SEELEY: The bees that go looking - and we call these Nest Sites Scouts. They are
among the oldest and probably the most-experienced bees in the swarm.
KRULWICH: And they're a small group, you say, about 5 percent of the hive. So how many
bees is that, 5 percent?
PROF. SEELEY: So that would be about three to 500.
KRULWICH: Oh.
PROF. SEELEY: So that's a sizeable search committee.
KRULWICH: Yes. So imagine you're a scout. You're all females. So off you go, wandering
the forest. You pass an elm tree, then a beech tree, then an oak tree. Then on the oak tree, you
see a nice-looking hole. So you enter. You look around. And then after your inspection...
PROF. SEELEY: What you will do at that point, is you will come back to the swarm cluster,
and there you will perform a waggle dance.
KRULWICH: That's a classic dance in the style of a figure eight done by honey bees. And
what the waggle dance says is...
(Soundbite of music)
KRULWICH: (Singing) It's here. It's here. To find it, you've got to go here. It's here. It's here.
To find it you got to go north by northwest, 120 degrees, by the dandelions and the
rhododendrons.
PROF. SEELEY: That's it. Yup.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PROF. SEELEY: Then she runs right around again, back to the starting point and does
another one, over and over again. And she's indicating the direction and distance to the site
that she discovered. I should mention, she's spent about 30 minutes checking out that site.
She's measured all the relevant properties of the site. It's as if she ranks it on a scale of one to
10, 10 being tops.
When she gets back to the swarm, if it's a 10, she might do 300 of these dance circuits, which
might take 10 minutes. But if it's only mediocre - let's say it's a three - she might only do 30
of the dance circuits, which could only take a minute or two. And so the better she thinks her
site is, the longer, the more persistently she will dance to advertise that site.

KRULWICH: And the more she dances, the more the other scout bees back at the swarm,
they get to see the dance. So now they have directions, and they can also visit the same site.
PROF. SEELEY: Exactly. If you're only dancing one minute, it might only be maybe five or
six bees that can get the message. If you're dancing 10 minutes, it might be 50 or 60 bees that
can get your message.
KRULWICH: So if they like the site, then they come back and they dance the same dance,
and dancers beget more dancers and more dancers. And that's how they vote. Eventually, one
dance wins.
PROF. SEELEY: This process tends to snowball.
KRULWICH: Now, here's a question: Do they end up making the right choice? I mean, do
you know?
PROF. SEELEY: Yes. We know that they do choose well. That was an important question to
address.
KRULWICH: He knows because he ran an experiment. He built five, nest-like boxes and
placed them near a beehive in Maine.
PROF. SEELEY: And of those five, one of them will be an excellent home site. It'll be a box
with 40 liters of space.
KRULWICH: And that's just perfect size. So over and over, and year after year, he let the
bees choose a box, which they did.
PROF. SEELEY: And overall, it's probably 90 to 95 percent of the time they choose the best
box.
KRULWICH: That surprises me, you know, because I would think if you got a very
persuasive, but misguided - you know, an Adolf Hitler Bee...
Unidentified Woman: (German spoken)
KRULWICH: ...but she's like fabulously good at speaking, and she does the best wiggle
dances, and everybody follows her to hell. So they all go to the worst possible site.
(Soundbite of laughter)
KRULWICH: Why doesn't that happen?
PROF. SEELEY: The reason that doesn't happen, Robert, is that scout bees do not blindly
follow one very enthusiastic dancer.
KRULWICH: In fact, these bees, they don't follow anybody, he says.

PROF. SEELEY: Each of those bees makes her own independent evaluation of that site. And
only if the bee judges that that site really is good, will she herself then come back to the
swarm and advertise it.
KRULWICH: Ah. So there are checks and balances, here.
PROF. SEELEY: That's right. That's a key part of this whole process.
KRULWICH: So no Hitlers. No bullies. No queen telling you how to vote. The scouts just
dance themselves into a kind of voting consensus.
PROF. SEELEY: And that's certainly how it works, here. This demonstrates that democracy
really does work.
KRULWICH: Wow. There's one little sneaky thing that nature gave these bees that you just
haven't mentioned.
PROF. SEELEY: That's right.
KRULWICH: What about a bee who's absolutely convinced that she's got the best site, and
the majority wants an oak tree, she wants an elm tree? And she's thinking no, no, no, no, no,
no, no. I will never ever, ever give up.
PROF. SEELEY: We haven't seen any bees like that.
KRULWICH: Really?
PROF. SEELEY: That's correct. In the world of scout bees, you don't have die-hard bees that
just dance and dance and dance forever.
KRULWICH: So what do they do?
PROF. SEELEY: A bee puts forth her opinion for a while, as expressed in her dance, and
then she goes quiet. It's what I call the Retire and Rest.
(Soundbite of music)
KRULWICH: So she'll do 300 dances for her elm tree. And then when she's done, all the
passion just kind of disappears, just like water going down a drain?
PROF. SEELEY: Yeah, that's it. Yup. Yeah.
KRULWICH: And this is genetic? It's built in?
PROF. SEELEY: That's built in. And when you think about it, that works really well, because
it kind of clears the decks.
KRULWICH: I'll say. So now you don't have fanatics.

PROF. SEELEY: Because those fanatics, they're kind of gumming up the works. They're
keeping an idea going beyond the point at which it's actually useful.
KRULWICH: On the other hand, you can't get a principled bee. What you get, actually, is
animals, who, deep in their DNA, have a nature that favors consensus.
PROF. SEELEY: Yes. Each bee's behavior is tuned, is designed, has been shaped by natural
selection to make the swarm a good, decision-making body.
KRULWICH: And do you find yourself admiring these bees?
PROF. SEELEY: Oh, tremendously. In fact, I admire them so much, I've used some of the
things that I've learned to organize committee meetings.
KRULWICH: Like what kind of things?
PROF. SEELEY: We had a - recently, a very big debate. Didn't come to a conclusion, and the
chairman turned to me and said: Well, Tom, what would the bees do? And I'd have to say,
well, Greg...
KRULWICH: Greg, bees aren't ever-fanatics, like some professors we know.
(Soundbite of laughter)
PROF. SEELEY: Yeah, that's right. I prefer to say they're not stubborn.
KRULWICH: Well, that's a much better way to say it.
Tom Seeley's bee studies appear in his book, "Honeybee Democracy."
Robert Krulwich, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
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And I'm Renee Montagne.