
How Bees Argue - imartin2k
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/01/how-bees-argue.html
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monkeycantype
The most interesting thing I’ve ever seen was an argument between ants. As a
student I worked on a project to use California grey ants for pest control in
peach orchards ‘Formica aerata’ (it’s very effective). This involved capturing
wild colonies (digging them up) and breeding them in captivity. To move the
colony from the box of dug up dirt to the enclosure, I coated the inside of
the box with liquid Teflon (future cancer risk?) and slowly flooded the box,
the only way out was a bridge to the new enclosure. Over the next ten hours
the ants would compete, some moving eggs and larvae to the new enclosure, some
moving them back to the queen. Eventually, when the rising flood had converted
enough of the workers to the cause of the revolution, they will make an
attempt to move the queen, which she and and a coiterie of anti-diluvianists
would resist. The bridge to new enclosure would be a solid mass of writhing
black (like Venom from Spider-Man). The queen, noticeably larger than the
workers would repeat an escape and climb back over the living bridge to the
steadily submerging dirt pile again and again, until eventually overwhelmed
she was dragged by the masses to the new home, flailing and struggling all the
way.

~~~
Arnavion
(Imagining "anti-diluvianist" ants cracked me up, especially because of the
double pun.)

Does that mean the ants were unable to communicate the upcoming danger to each
other and had to rely on first-hand observation? That's surprising given how
much they communicate otherwise.

~~~
monkeycantype
I don’t know, but the way I thought about it is that I imagined each ant was
quite simple, and the fight was a distributed mind weighing the sum of the
fractions of reality perceived by each individual

~~~
ergothus
I saw a video quite a few years ago where they dump some ants on a platform,
with a string leading to another platform with an area that (apparently)
seemed like a decent home. (the below is according to my fallible memories)

One ant wandered to the good area and checked it all out. She then marched
back to the others, and bodily lifted another and took her to the good area.
They both inspected the area and each repeated the trek to pull in another
ant. This continued until "enough" ants were in the new area and they shifted
into "build a nest" mode.

It felt very oversimplified for TV viewers, but nonetheless was fascinating -
a breakdown of just HOW some simple models can lead to more complex emergent
behavior. I just tried to find this video without success (on the bright side,
there are a ton of OTHER fascinating ant videos out there)

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tboyd47
Takeaways:

* It is meaningful to speak of animals having "opinions" but it's not clear how those match up with human ones.

* Individual opinion is guided by a combination of random chance and direct perception.

* Individual bee opinions have low success rate, but group consensus of bees has an extremely high success rate.

* Opinions acquired via transmission are more weakly held than opinions acquired directly.

* Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find this fascinating because it means there's some information that would not be revealed without the bees challenging each other.

* Opinions are often never changed in an individual, even if they are wrong.

~~~
munchbunny
> Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find this
> fascinating because it means there's some information that would not be
> revealed without the bees challenging each other.

This seems to be an emergent effect of a system where every individual scout
explicitly communicates a degree of confidence, and the rest of the system can
trust the degree of confidence expressed by its individuals so that noise in
the actual signal (a scout bee mis-evaluating the quality of a potential home)
can be smoothed out a larger number of inputs.

That sounds a lot like the one-armed bandit for A/B testing!

That's an interesting comparison to modern human society, where you can't at
all trust how confident someone sounds, because everyone has learned to game
that system.

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pmoskovi
Inspired by the behavior of bees and the Seeley's Honeybee Democracy book, I
created and gave a talk, titled Extreme Cooperation of Superorganisms - Four
Lessons Humans Can Learn from Bees:
[https://slides.com/petermoskovits/superorganism/](https://slides.com/petermoskovits/superorganism/)

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stolen_biscuit
Do we know how bees encode location data in their dances? Do we have a catalog
of their dances? I mean does 3 butt wiggles followed by a head bob mean go
towards the sun until you smell lavender?

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reedwolf
>Waiting another hour or so gives enough time for scouts to return from other
sites, and then the entire cluster heads off together to this new site

What happens if a bee is late coming back and everyone is gone?

~~~
almindor
This happens regularly, the bee cluster doesn't wait for late comers. There
are some scouts that keep going there and back but there are also scouts that
do that with the "Correct" destination, so they "lead" the stray ones to their
new home eventually. In the end most bees end up where they're supposed to.

It's much worse when a beekeeper takes the swarm tho. Speaking from
experience, you can see "lost" scouts going to and from the temporary cluster
from their destinations for days after you moved the cluster into a new hive.
The reason is because there's noone going from cluster to new hive since no
scout found that destination. It's a bit heartbreaking.

I collected the "leftover" mini-clusters 4 times in a row coz I felt
responsible...

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Gedxx
I'm trying to make this DIY beehive [https://www.ikkaro.net/diy-
beehive/](https://www.ikkaro.net/diy-beehive/) and I hope to observe his
behavior soon.

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Yetino
Borrowing cryptocurrency terms, this seems to be a Proof of Excitement
consensus algorithm

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HNLurker2
Nice to see overcoming bias post. Do people still read LW?

