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Stop Signals Provide Cross Inhibition in Collective Decision-Making by Honeybee Swarms

Stop, Don't Go There Decision-making in complex brains requires the reaching of a consensus based on information relayed by multiple neurons. A similar situation occurs in the decision-making process of swarming bees, where multiple individuals relay information about suitable hive sites, but a single site is chosen by the swarm. Seeley et al. (p. 108, published online 8 December; see the Perspective by Niven ) show that consensus in this system is reached as information from scouting bees accumulates within the hive. Stop signals were given by scout bees from a particular site to those scout bees signaling from other sites. As the signals accumulate, scouting ceases and the bees prepare to swarm to the site that was best represented among the scouts. When this process was simulated, the results indicated that cross-inhibition among the bees functions similarly to that which occurs among neurons within complex brains. In both cases, such cross-inhibition prevents the overall system from coming to an impasse. Scout bees bring about nest-site decisions by targeting stop signals at bees with other candidate sites. Honeybee swarms and complex brains show many parallels in how they make decisions. In both, separate populations of units (bees or neurons) integrate noisy evidence for alternatives, and, when one population exceeds a threshold, the alternative it represents is chosen. We show that a key feature of a brain—cross inhibition between the evidence-accumulating populations—also exists in a swarm as it chooses its nesting site. Nest-site scouts send inhibitory stop signals to other scouts producing waggle dances, causing them to cease dancing, and each scout targets scouts’ reporting sites other than her own. An analytic model shows that cross inhibition between populations of scout bees increases the reliability of swarm decision-making by solving the problem of deadlock over equal sites.