The experiments are they're done in our lab. So we bring in a swarm of honeybees for about 10,000 bees and a queen to the lab. And then we can see what the bees do, how much they send,. How they explore the environment and eventually also aggregate around the queen. Do they basically behave in the same way as the model predicts? Yeah, exactly. It's in really good agreement. When we analyze our experiment, we see that the bees indeed sent. They produce those chemicals in an efficient direction.
One of the things that make complexity science so fascinating is the diversity of the systems that it applies to. In this series so far, you've learnt about everything from ecologies to economies, tipping points in ecologies and economies, to power and influence in the 1400s, and even the spread of coronavirus in the lungs and the thing that brings all of these different topics together is complexity. This means that we can study one system to help us understand other systems — including bees.
In today's episode, Orit Peleg, Faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, explains how bees self-organise and produce sophisticated behaviour. In this case, you'll hear how thousands of bees can work out where their queen is at any given point.
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This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.