![]() bees in the model blindly following the waggle dances of others without first checking. leaving the swarm homelss and vulnerable. By experimenting with it they found that, when bees in the model were very good at finding nesting sites but did not share their information, this dramatically slowed down the migration. The decision is remarkably reliable ,with the bees choosing the best site even when there are only small difference between alternative sites.īut exactly how do bees reach such a robust consensus? To find out ,Dr List and his colleagues used a computer generated model of the decision-making process. The process eventually leads to a consensus on the best site and the breakaway swarm migrates. After a while, other bees start to visit the sites signaled by their companions to see for themselves and, on their return, also perform more waggle dances. ![]() The longer the dance, the better the site. Among the bees that depart are some that have searched for and found some new nest sites, and reported back using a characteristic body movement known as a 'waggle dance' to indicate to the other bees the suitable places they have located. ![]() The queen goes off with about two-thirds of the worker bees to live in a new home or nest, leaving a daughter queen in the old nest with the remaining workers. Researchers led by Dr List looked at colonies once the original colony reaches a certain size. Bees make collective decisions ,and they do it rather well, according to Christian List of the London School of Economics ,who has studied group decision-making in humans and animals. Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants ,bees. Moreover, the probability of a correct decision increases with the size of the jury. If, for example, each member of a jury has only partial information ,the majority decision is more likely to be correct than a decision arrived at by a single juror. Condorcet’s theory describes collective decisions, outlining how democratic decisions tend to outperform dictatorial ones. The idea goes back to the 'jury theorem’ of Nicolas de Condorcet, an 18 th -century French philosopher who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the social sciences. It has long been held that decision made collectively by large groups of people are more likely to turn out to be accurate than decisions made by individuals. ![]()
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