---
title: "Honeybee swarms · Collective systems · Entities · Simulation Hypothesis"
url: https://simulation-hypothesis.com/entities/c-bees
description: "Swarms pick the best cavity through competition between scouts and a quorum. Stop signals provide cross-inhibition, which breaks deadlocks."
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
credit: "Ross Allan Dahl, Simulation Hypothesis (simulation-hypothesis.com)"
---

[Entities](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/entities) › Collective systems

# Honeybee swarms

Swarms pick the best cavity through competition between scouts and a quorum. Stop signals provide cross-inhibition, which breaks deadlocks.

What’s measured

Counts of scout dances, support for each nest site, the quorum at the chosen site, and stop signals.

## Evidence

* Swarms pick the best cavity through competition between scouts and a quorum. Stop signals provide cross-inhibition, which breaks deadlocks.  
Seeley TD (2010). Honeybee Democracy. Princeton UP; Seeley TD et al. (2012). Stop signals provide cross inhibition in collective decision-making by honeybee swarms. Science 335:108-111\. doi:10.1126/science.1210361.

Research on collective intelligence studies how groups decide. It doesn't claim that the group itself has experiences.

In the trees

[Police the egg-layers · Ethics](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/trees/ethics?n=e-police)