Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to carry out a detailed investigation of the mechanisms operating during decision making by the honey bee swarm, which is now considered to be one of the best examples of collective decision making outside the human domain. Design/methodology/approach – This investigation is based on a review of the last 60 years’ published literature about swarm behaviour. It introduces a different perspective to the work by utilising a cybernetic model of a self-organising information network to analyse the findings of this body of research. Findings – Scout bees evaluating potential nest sites accumulated support for their site by differential net recruitment, so the total scout numbers present at each site was a good measure of the total evidence in favour of the site and hence the relative probability of choosing it as the swarm’s new home. The accumulation of evidence continued at a number of alternative nest site locations until a critical quorum threshold was sensed at one of them. The first alternative to reach the threshold was chosen as the preferred nest site. Quorum scouts then prepared the swarm for departure and steered it to its new home. Originality/value – Swarm decision making has not been modelled as a self-organising information network before. This novel approach reveals how a combination of network modifications, self-amplification, self-attenuation, cross-inhibition, integration and quorum mechanisms together contribute towards accurate group decision making.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a viable system, the honey bee swarm, gathers meaningful information about potential new nest sites in its problematic environment. Design/methodology/approach -This investigation uses a cybernetic model of a self-organising information network to analyse the findings from the last 60 years published research on swarm behaviour. Findings -Nest site scouts used a modified foraging network to carry out a very thorough survey of the swarm's problematic environment, providing the swarm with a considerable diversity of potential nest sites for consideration. The swarm utilised a number of randomly recruited groups of scouts to obtain numerous independent opinions about potential nest sites, each privately evaluated, publicly reported and repeatedly tested by new recruits. Independent evaluation of site quality was balanced by interdependent reporting of site location. Noise was reduced by integration over a large number of individual scouts and over a period of time. The swarm was therefore able to reduce potential sources of bias, distortion and noise, providing it with comparatively reliable information for decision making. Originality/value -Information gathering by a honey bee swarm has not previously been modelled as a self-organising information network. The findings may be of value to human decision-making groups.

This article examines some of the major mechanisms that might contribute to the apparent collective intelligence of the honey bee swarm and determines their role in its nest site decision making process. Decentralization of power allowed the swarm to utilize massively parallel information processing during its search for a new home. Various diversity generating mechanisms provided the swarm with a full range of potential nest sites for consideration. Numerous independent evaluations of nest site quality provided a relatively unbiased and noise free assessment of each site's survival worthiness. Differential net recruitment to the better quality sites aggregated evidence in favour of each site. A natural selection type process selected out the best competing sites and the first site to accumulate a quorum level of support was chosen as the swarm's new home. The article discusses the implications of these findings and how they relate to collective decision making by human groups. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study investigated the resource budget available to a typical honey bee swarm as it gathered information and decided which was the best of some 13–34 potential nest sites to move into and become its new home. After a brief description of the decision‐making mechanisms involved, the utilization of the swarm's finite energy, memory and carrier resources is described. It was found that each individual scout decision maker only carried enough energy reserves to provide for 2.6 days of visits to evaluate distant sites and, effectively, only enough memory space to remember the location and quality of approximately one site. Scouts, who only formed 4.4% of the swarm bees, consumed 22.8% of the swarm's energy budget, showing that their best‐of‐N computations were energetically very expensive. A typical swarm of 12,000 bees only contained enough energy reserves to last for 13.5 days after which foraging had to restart.

The steady‐state (d.c.) electrical conductivity of polypropylene has been measured as a function of temperature (25–150°C.) and field strength (0–94 kv./cm.). The temperature coefficient of the conductivity is 34.6 kcal./mole expressed as an activation energy. This is much larger than the activation energy for diffusion of small molecules in the same polymer. Thus, ionization rather than diffusion appears to be the primary activation process. The conductivity is nonohmic; the conductance quotient is a linear function of field strength but is larger than predicted by Onsager's theory. The ion “jump distance” as evaluated from the isothermal field dependence, is the same order of magnitude as the diffusional mean free path estimated from diffusion studies in other polymers. The conductivity, conduction activation energy, and field dependence appear to be relatively insensitive to polymer crystallinity.