The Bee Hive as an Information Center

Whenever foraging is possible, a honey bee colony must solve the problem of keeping its foragers optimally allocated among the flower patches that its scouts have found.   Flower patches that are large and highly profitable should be allocated many foragers, while those that are small or less profitable should be allocated relatively few foragers.  We will look at how a honey bee colony solves this highly dynamic problem, and we will see that the logic of the solution that they have evolved (the so-called “Honey Bee Algorithm”) is extremely important to human beings as well, for we use the same logic for allocating server computers (analogous to worker bees) among web sites (analogous to flower patches) around the world.