:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Social Learning as bees

Analogy Map

Scout bees	Human groups
Waggle dance	Language
Strong cooperation / one shared purpose	Less strong cooperation, within-group competition, often many individual interests besides group purpose
One clearly defined “life-or-death” problem	Often no clearly defined problem or several problems with trade-offs (wicked problems)
A clearly defined “best” solution among the options (clear relationship between site quality and type of waggle dance for all bees)	No clearly defined “best” solution (no clear relationship between theoretically best solution and individual opinions, influenced by emotions, cognitive biases, experiences, values and morals)
Decision making procedure hard-wired into nervous system	Decision making procedures are cultural artifacts and influenced by emotions, values and morals, experiences etc.
Decision making process adapted to 30 Mio year old evolutionary environment	Drastically changed social and natural environment compared to evolutionary past
Bees can evaluate proposed sites for themselves before making a decision	Limited possibility for humans to evaluate the superiority of one solution over another before making a decision

Quote Bank

Seeley (2010):

“the bees demonstrate to us several principles of effective group decision-making and that by implementing them we can raise the reliability of decision making by human groups.”

“The house-hunting bees exemplify a group whose members have shared interests and mutual respect….the genetic success of each worker bee in a honeybee colony depends on the fate of the entire colony….The humans in a community rarely share a singularity of purpose like the bees in a swarm, so humans are less inclined than bees to be highly cooperative when tackling a problem they must address together.”

“the swarm bees choose their new home without a leader integrating information from different sources or telling the others what to do. Even the all-important queen, who is certainly the genetic heart of a swarm, is merely a bystander…..Unlike honeybee swarms, most human groups operate with a leader. So clearly, a prominent question we must address is how the leader of a decision-making body should behave to promote sound thinking by the group.”

“[bees] have just one problem to solve (so there is no confusion about their objective and no tendency for their discussion to drift off topic) and by the way they have rules of procedure that are hardwired into their nervous systems (so there is no need for someone to define or enforce their rules of procedure). Thus the house-hunting bees remind us that the leader in a democratic group serves mainly to shape the process, not the product, of the group’s deliberations. The bees also demonstrate that a democratic group can function perfectly well without a leader if the group’s members agree on the problems they face and on the protocol they will use to make their decisions.”

“perhaps most impressive about the bees’ system of social choice is its ability to distinguish good options from bad ones so that almost always a swarm selects the single best site from among the dozen or more possible homesites that its scout bees have discovered.”

“No scout bee, not even one that has encountered a wildly exuberant dancer, will blindly follow another scout’s opinion by dancing for a site she has not inspected. This is critical...A scout will copy the dance that informed her of a site, but only after she has scrutinized the site herself and has concluded it truly deserves to be promoted. Thus the scout bees make use of the power of communication to help good ideas spread.”

“How can humans use what the bees have demonstrated about aggregating the knowledge and opinions of a group’s members to make good choices for the group as a whole? I suggest three things. First, we use the power of an open and fair competition of ideas, in the form of a frank debate […] Second, we foster good communication within the debating group, recognizing that this is how valuable information that is uncovered by one member will quickly reach the other members. And third, we recognize that while it is important for a group’s members to listen to what everyone else is saying, it is essential that they listen critically, form their own opinions about the options being discussed, and register their views independently.”

“This debate works much like a political election, for there are multiple candidates (nest sites), competing advertisements (waggle dances) for the different candidates, individuals who are committed to one or another candidate (scouts supporting a site), and a pool of neutral voters (scouts not yet committed to a site).”

“each scout bee makes her own, independent decision of whether or not to support a site, based on her own, personal evaluation of the site, not on how others judge the site. Thus the bees aggregate the information about their options by conducting an open debate in which the best site prevails by virtue of its superiority, as judged time and time and time again by dozens, if not hundreds, of independent-minded scout bees.”

“Over this vast stretch of evolutionary time, natural selection has structured these insect search committees so that they make the best possible decisions. Now, at last, we humans have the pleasure of knowing how this ingenious selection process works, and the opportunity to use this knowledge to improve our own lives.”

Further Resources

Krasny, M. E., & Tidball, K. G. (2015). Chapter 7. Learning like bees. In: Civic Ecology: Adaptation and Transformation from the Ground Up. MIT Press. http://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262028653.001.0001

Analogies for Sustainable Development