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The Bioeconomics of Scout Bees Voting-with-the-Wings Using Less-Than-Unanimity Voting Rule: Can Bees Count, Quorum Sense, etc.?

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Public Choice, Past and Present

Part of the book series: Studies in Public Choice ((SIPC,volume 28))

Abstract

Recent experimental findings by Thomas Seeley et al. (2006) found that the essence of group decision-making by scout bees is their use of a kind of “quorum-sensing” voting rule, rather than the unanimity rule (Martin Lindauer 1961) in arriving at their collective choice of the best new nest site. In light of the new experimental findings, this paper revises my earlier paper’s (Landa 1986) theoretical conclusion that the unanimity rule is the “best” rule for the scout bees’ collective choice of the best new nest site. A novelty in this paper is my hypothesis that bees, though unable to count, are able to “subitize” and hence able to sense when a collective decision by a quorum of scout bees has been reached.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a fascinating discussion of counting and numbers, see Brian Butterworth (1999).

  2. 2.

    2 See the fascinating book by Keith Devlin (2011) on counting and the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numerical system by Leonardo Pisano (Leonardo of Pisa), nicknamed Fibonacci, to the Western trading world.

  3. 3.

    3  See, for example, Landa’s (1998) paper on schooling fish, which uses Buchanan’s (1965) theory of clubs, combined with Buchanan–Tullock’s (1962) “Calculus of Consent” theoretical framework. See also Landa and Wallis (1988), Landa and Tullock (2003).

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Acknowledgments

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Second World Congress of the Public Choice Societies, Hyatt Regency Miami, Florida, 8–11 March 2012. I would like to thank Bernard Grofman, discussant of my paper, Charles K. Rowley, and Anthony Wallis for helpful comments which improved this chapter.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Janet T. Landa

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  1. Janet T. Landa
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Correspondence to Janet T. Landa .

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  1. Blackburn St, Unit 301 3000, Dallas, 75204, Texas, USA

    Dwight R. Lee

Additional information

I dedicate this paper to my professors, James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of their seminal book, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962.

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Landa, J.T. (2013). The Bioeconomics of Scout Bees Voting-with-the-Wings Using Less-Than-Unanimity Voting Rule: Can Bees Count, Quorum Sense, etc.?. In: Lee, D. (eds) Public Choice, Past and Present. Studies in Public Choice, vol 28. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5909-5_7

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