nest-site selection: one construct, many systems

When a honey bee colony swarms, hundreds of scout bees inspect candidate cavities and advertise them on the swarm cluster with waggle dances whose vigour reflects site quality, until support builds for one site and the swarm commits and flies to it. Lindauer's 1955 Schwarmbienen auf Wohnungssuche first traced this process, and Seeley's Honeybee democracy shows it works by a build-up of scouts at the best site combined with cross-inhibition between competing sites, reaching a quorum before the move. The referent is a leaderless collective decision among options, measured by how scout support shifts over time and how often the group picks the best site, the very same decision construct seen in house-hunting ants.[1][2]

Unit

A swarm's collective choice of one nest site among several

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Tracked by scout recruitment and dancing to each site, the quorum threshold reached, decision speed, and accuracy in choosing the best cavity

House-hunting ants face the same problem when their nest is destroyed: individual scouts assess candidate sites and recruit nestmates, and once the number of ants at a site passes a quorum the colony switches to rapid transport and emigrates there. Franks and colleagues' 2002 study frames this as information flow, opinion polling and a form of collective intelligence that lets the colony trade speed against accuracy. The referent is the identical quorum-based collective decision as in a bee swarm, realised in a different social insect, and measured by the same currencies of recruitment, quorum size, speed and how reliably the colony chooses the better site.[3]

Unit

A colony's collective choice of a new nest during emigration

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured by scout recruitment, the quorum threshold triggering transport, emigration speed, and accuracy under a speed–accuracy trade-off