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MBL Falmouth Forum Series 2011-2012
"Honeybee Democracy"
March 30, 2012 - 7:30 PM, Falmouth High School
Lectures are free and open to the public.
Dr. Thomas Seeley, Dept. of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University
CO-SPONSORED with The 300 Committee Land Trust, Falmouth
The 300 Committee is a private, non-profit land trust that, since 1985, has helped preserve more than 2,300 acres throughout Falmouth for conservation, recreation and water protection.
Lecture Abstract: Swarm intelligence is the solving of a cognitive problem by two or more individuals who independently collect information and process it through social interactions. With the right organization, a group can overcome the cognitive limitations of its members and achieve a high collective IQ. To understand how to endow groups with swarm intelligence, it is useful to examine natural systems that have evolved this ability. An excellent example is a swarm of honey bees solving the life-or-death problem of finding a new home. A honey bee swarm accomplishes this through a process that includes collective fact-finding, open sharing of information, vigorous debating, and fair voting by the hundreds of bees in a swarm that function as nest-site scouts. Thomas Seeley will show how these incredible insects have much to teach us when it comes to achieving collective wisdom and effective group decision making.
Dr. Thomas D. Seeley is a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, where he teaches courses in animal behavior and does research on the functional organization of honey bee colonies.
He grew up in Ithaca, New York. He began keeping and studying bees while a high school student, when he brought home a swarm of bees in a wooden box. He went away to college at Dartmouth in 1970, but he returned to Ithaca each summer to work for Dr. Roger A. Morse at the Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies at Cornell University, where he learned the craft of beekeeping and began probing the inner workings of the honey bee colony. Thoroughly intrigued by the smooth functioning of bee colonies, he went on to graduate school at Harvard University where he studied under two ant men (Drs. Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson), began his research on bees in earnest, and earned his Ph.D. in 1978. After teaching at Yale for six years, he worked his way home to Ithaca/Cornell in 1986, where he has been ever since. In recognition of his scientific work, he has received the Senior Scientist Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His research focuses on the internal organization of honey bee colonies and has been summarized in three books: Honeybee Ecology (1985, Princeton University Press), The Wisdom of the Hive (1995, Harvard University Press), and Honeybee Democracy (2010, Princeton University Press).
Admission to this MBL Falmouth Forum presentation is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the MBL Communications Office at: (508) 289-7423 or
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