Information flow, opinion polling and collective intelligence in house–hunting social insects

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Abstract
The sharing and collective processing of information by certain insect societies is one of the reasons that they warrant the superlative epithet 'super–organisms‘ (Franks 1989, Am. Sci. 77 , 138–145). We describe a detailed experimental and mathematical analysis of information exchange and decision–making in, arguably, the most difficult collective choices that social insects face: namely, house hunting by complete societies. The key issue is how can a complete colony select the single best nest–site among several alternatives? Individual scouts respond to the diverse information they have personally obtained about the quality of a potential nest–site by producing a recruitment signal. The colony then deliberates over (i.e. integrates) different incoming recruitment signals associated with different potential nest–sites to achieve a well–informed collective decision. We compare this process in honeybees and in the ant Leptothorax albipennis. Notwithstanding many differences – for example, honeybee colonies have 100 times more individuals than L. albipennis colonies – there are certain similarities in the fundamental algorithms these societies appear to employ when they are house hunting.

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