The Bioeconomics of Scout Bees Voting-with-the-Wings Using Less-Than-Unanimity Voting Rule: Can Bees Count, Quorum Sense, etc.?

Recent experimental findings by Thomas Seeley et al. (2006) found that the essence of group decision-making by scout bees is their use of a kind of “quorum-sensing” voting rule, rather than the unanimity rule (Martin Lindauer 1961) in arriving at their collective choice of the best new nest site. In light of the new experimental findings, this paper revises my earlier paper’s (Landa 1986) theoretical conclusion that the unanimity rule is the “best” rule for the scout bees’ collective choice of the best new nest site. A novelty in this paper is my hypothesis that bees, though unable to count, are able to “subitize” and hence able to sense when a collective decision by a quorum of scout bees has been reached.

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