Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms

In the years since Lindauer's work, several investigators had studied the real-estate preferences of honey bees and had found that a first-rate home for a honey bee colony has a cavity volume greater than 20 liters and an entrance hole that is smaller than 30 square centimeters, perched several meters off the ground, facing south and located at the floor of the cavity. Good group decisions, the bees show us, can be fostered by endowing a group with three key habits: structuring each deliberation as an open competition of ideas, promoting diversity of knowledge and independence of opinions among a group's members and aggregating the opinions in a way that meets time constraints yet wisely exploits the breadth of knowledge within the group.