MBI Lecture: Real Democracy - How Honeybees Choose A Home

The Mathematical Biosciences Institute at Ohio State University is holding a free public lecture at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday (6/17) in 355 Jennings Hall (MBI Auditorium). Thomas D. Seeley, assistant professor of kinesiology at Cornell University will deliver “Real Democracy: How Honeybees Choose a Home.” A reception will follow.

Real democracy — when citizens meet in a face-to-face assembly and bind themselves under decisions they make themselves — has been practiced for some 2500 years by humans, but for more than 20 million years by honey bees. We will examine the remarkable democratic decision-making process of a honey bee swarm as it chooses a new home. We will see that bees have evolved sophisticated ways of working together to identify a dozen or more potential dwelling places, to choose the highest quality one for their new home site, and to make a decision without undue delay. We will conclude with some take-home lessons from the bees (“swarm
smarts”) on how to foster good decision making by democratic groups of humans.

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