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DIVISION OF LABOR. "A honeybee colony, individuals specialize in certain tasks, depending on their age. Older bees, for example, tend to be the foragers for the hive. But the allocation of tasks is not rigid: when food is scarce, younger nurse bees will forage, too ... scientists have yet to understand exactly how honeybees regulate their division of labor." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

TASK ALLOCATION. "One of the major drivers in the evolution of social complexity is task partitioning between group members. In social insects it is taken to extremes in the form of reproductive (queen) and non-reproductive (worker, soldier) castes." https://lnkd.in/d42MTRa View in LinkedIn

BROOD SORTING BY ANTS. "The workers of the ant ... sort the colony’s brood systematically. Eggs and microlarvae are placed at the center of an area, the largest larvae at the periphery, and pupae and prepupae in between. One explanation of this behavior is that ants pick up and drop items according to the number of similar surrounding objects." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

QUORUM SENSING IN INSECT COLONIES. "Social insect colonies are an excellent example of a decentralized system, because no individual is in charge of directing or making decisions for the colony. Several groups of social insects have been shown to use quorum sensing in a process that resembles collective decision-making." http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing View in LinkedIn

CORPSE SORTING BY ANTS. "Workers pile up their colony's dead to clean their nests. If the corpses are randomly distributed at the beginning of the experiment, the workers will form clusters within a few hours ... individual ants pick up and drop corpses as a function of the density of corpses they detect in their neighborhood." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

SELECTION AT THE SOCIAL LEVEL. "The “superorganism” is more than a heuristic metaphor (e.g., queens are the colony’s ovaries and workers its soma) but that colonies indeed are organisms comprised of organisms that undergo selection as a single entity at a level above that of gene and individual." https://lnkd.in/dS_w2bD View in LinkedIn

BEST FIT FOR SALESMAN PROBLEM. "It is important to note that this ant-based method is effective for finding short routes but not necessarily the shortest one. Nevertheless, such near-optimal solutions are often more than adequate, particularly because obtaining the best route can require an unwieldy amount of computation." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

ANT SALESMAN. "Envision a colony of such ants, each independently hopping from city to city, favoring nearby locations but otherwise traveling randomly. After completing a tour of all the cities, an ant goes back to the links it used and deposits pheromone. The amount of the chemical is inversely proportional to the overall length of the tour: the shorter the distance, the more pheromone each of the links receives." https://lnkd.in/dDUTsM2 View in LinkedIn

TRAVELING SALESMAN PROBLEM: "a person must find the shortest route by which to visit a given number of cities, each exactly once ... For just 15 cities, there are billions of route possibilities." https://scholar.google.es/scholar?q=swarm+cognition+in+insects+and+pheromones&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 View in LinkedIn

NEGATIVE CHEMICAL SIGNALS. "The use of negative pheromones has already been reported in social insects: honeybee and bumble-bee foragers, for example, mark recently visited, exhausted flowers with chemicals that repel other foragers until nectar has been replenished." https://lnkd.in/d5UvDeJ View in LinkedIn