I've got a good friend who's getting his Masters in Hortaculture and has gone head-over-heels for bees in the process. He's constantly regaling me with amazing bee anecdotes, and I remain constantly amazed.

One of the little mysteries of beedom is how they choose a new hive. When a swarm of bees is looking to move, several hundred scout bees take off and scour the countryside for prime hive real estate. They each come back with a unique waggle-dance that gives the location of their candidate site. Out of all the hundreds of locations (and dances!) that are brought back to the hive, the swarm must decide as a group on the single location they will all accept as their new home.

We know that each scout bee dances for the other bees, and that as the hours go by, some bees begin changing their dances. Eventually, one dance out of the hundreds emerges as victor, and then, when the swarm is dancing that dance, the entire mass of bees spontaneously flies off to a location they've never seen before to build their new home.

So how does democracy, bee-style, work? Mellitologists want to know, too. They still have no idea why individual dances are accepted or rejected, or what criteria the bees use to make their decisions. Something more than just location-communicating is going is on. Eventually we'll find out, and bees will become even more fascinating.

A beekeeper once told me that if you place an obstacle a foot or two away from the entrance to a hive, the bees will be totally perplexed, and buzz around in a cloud, not knowing how to enter. Eventually one or two will find a way around, and that will become the new path. But if you then remove the obstacle, the bees will take quite a while to enter the hive directly, instead circumventing the now imaginary object.
Reading the news, I realize that this same trick can be done with humans, except the original obstacle can also be imaginary.

To elaborate on the way bees relate to their own kind:

About three years ago, I came home to the house I was renting to find a pair of workmen installing a higher-capacity power feed into my home. This entailed drilling a half-dozen holes into the outside wall to hang the new conduit, breaker box, etc.

The work was a mistake, they were two blocks away from the intended customer. So they tore it all out and left. And they left the holes (maybe 1/2" diameter) open and unplugged.

About two days later, my neighbor on that side of the house pointed out that there was a cloud of bees over his driveway focused on the holes in my wall. They were trying to move in. I didn't think they'd make good roommates for my cats, so I donned my leather jacket, fencing mask, thick overalls and climbed the ladder while the neighbor did his best to dissuade them with the water hose from interfering with my Bondo job on the holes.

I ended up coming down the ladder real quick and cutting my hand to the tune of a dozen or so stitches. But the holes were plugged. I had to use some expanding foam to keep them from climbing the old conduit in the old breaker box, but a few days later, I had prevailed. I thought.

Cut to next year, within a day or two of the incident the previous year. The neighbor informed me again that they were back. They were hovering around the bondo'd holes (it seemed like they remembered exactly where the holes were on the wall). They were also storming the old breaker/meter box again (since the meter reader was relentless in removing anything covering the meter-reading-hole). This time, a combination of gaffer tape, axle grease and 2 part expanding foam did the trick. (Hell, what can't you fix with that ?)

We played out this dance at the exact same time of year for two more years (that's a total of 4).

Bees don't live that long. At least the worker variety. Not sure about the queen or drones. It fascinates me that they have a way of passing very specific date and time information down through what I figure is dozens of worker-bee generations. I've read that they communicate location via a codified "bee-dance". Apparently they communicate temporal information somehow (possibly the same means). Since different flowers bloom at different times, this makes sense. But without any flowers near that location, they apparently use the same method to "discuss" locations for a new hive.

Everytime I look at the 3" scar on my hand, I am impressed and wary of the hive mind.

http://www.fotolog.net/vak/
i dunno

"I bet every single element of it had purpose ... all the way down to the substrate of the universe itself."

Well, he makes a compelling argument pro-dead-bee but arguing that junk dna is purposefull is stretching it. Go desk go.