Humans Are Not the Only Animals That Vote, Honeybees Too
Are humans the only animals who use voting to make major decisions? Generally, when our groups need to make significant decisions, voting is a more natural and effective way. Of course, this smart method isn't just used by humans; we're familiar with honeybees too.
Sometimes we might see a large group of bees buzzing and shaking on a branch, like a bunch of dangerous grapes, making us hesitant to approach. In fact, these are the bees dividing their colony.
Division is the natural way for honeybee colonies to expand. When the climate is warm, food is abundant inside the hive, and the bee colony becomes large, the bees will cultivate a new queen. Before the new queen is about to be born, the old queen and half of the worker bees will fly away from the original hive to build a new hive in another place.
At this time, the bees leaving the original hive face an important decision that concerns their survival—where to build the hive. Will the hive location determine whether the bee colony can safely survive the winter? Will it be eaten by predators? Are there enough nectar sources nearby to collect?
Going to a new hive location is not decided by the queen; this decision is made by all members together. Honeybees are natural democrats, and they have gradually formed this behavior during evolution.
The hive will send out about 5% or even less scout bees to find suitable places. These scout bees are older, more experienced, and more intelligent bees within the hive. They find multiple different locations suitable for residence within the original beehive's vicinity for dozens of miles, and after carefully scouting the location, they return to the hive and tell their companions through dancing about their scouting results.
The scout bees' unique dance can convey information about the target location's position, direction, distance, and surrounding nectar sources to their companions. Other bees carefully observe the dances that transmit different destination locations. Some bees even personally fly to these locations to conduct a field survey before returning to cast an important vote.
The honeybee's voting method is simple—they dance with the scout bees that they support, and they try to persuade their companions. In the end, they reach a consensus so that all the bees agree to dance the same dance. Once all the bees agree, these bees will fly together to the new home.
Of course, you might ask, 'Won't some stubborn little bees be unable to reach a consensus?' Haha, actually, it won't. The difference between humans and honeybees is that people are more inclined to stick to their opinions and not want to exit the debate, sometimes until death without changing their minds, while honeybees will automatically exit; a minority obeys the majority. I can't help but wonder, if people could perform more like honeybees, would humans progress faster?
