Professor Dr Thomas D. Seeley

Research priorities: Animal behavior, sociobiology, evolution, bees, swarm intelligence

Thomas D. Seeley is an American behavioral biologist whose research focuses on the social life, behavior, and ecology of honeybees. He is particularly interested in how these insects cooperate, communicate, and make decisions. He is considered one of the leading proponents of the concept of swarm intelligence. In addition, the researcher, who has been an amateur beekeeper since his youth, has developed new approaches to beekeeping.

From the researcher’s perspective, a bee colony is not merely a crowd of individual animals. Rather, it is a “superorganism” in which all members work together as a unit, share their knowledge, and thus succeed collectively. From 1980 to 1995, Thomas Seeley studied how this collective behavior works during foraging. He was particularly interested in how the insects intelligently distribute themselves across an ever changing landscape of flower patches. In 1995, he published his findings in the book “The Wisdom of the Hive”.

Another aspect of swarm intelligence that the researcher has studied in depth is honeybees’ choice of nesting sites. Over a period of 15 summers, from 1995 to 2010, he investigated how a swarm decides on its future home. To do this, he recorded and interpreted the so-called waggle dances, which the bees use to convey messages to their conspecifics. In this way, Thomas Seeley discovered that several hundred scout bees engage in a kind of “debate” to select the best nesting site from a dozen possible options.

According to his findings, this decision-making process is essentially a competition to see which option is the first to reach a certain threshold of support among the scout bees. Once this quorum is reached, the bees sense it. They then prompt the swarm to leave its temporary stopover and guide it to its destination, the new home. In Thomas Seeley’s opinion the quorum principle leads to an optimal decision. In this process, a few scout bees propose new nesting sites through waggle dances. The swarm then evaluates these in a multi-stage process before finally accepting a single new nesting site. The scientist described this process 2010 in his book “Honeybee Democracy”, which generated a great interest.

Based on his work, the researcher has also drawn conclusions concerning the swarm intelligence of other species, including humans. According to his findings, particularly effective groups of bees as well as humans are characterized by five keys to success: A diversity of knowledge and an open, honest sharing of information are just as important as independent evaluations, an unbiased gathering of opinions, and a leadership culture that does not rely on dominance.

Thomas Seeley’s work is also of interest for the practice of beekeeping. He has observed that there are wild swarms of honeybees that defy parasites, predators, and fluctuating food supplies entirely without human support. He has therefore proposed keeping the bees under conditions as close to nature as possible. In that way they have better chances to employ the survival strategies that have proven effective during evolution.