How Honey Bees Use Voter-Based Democracy

This use of voting-based democracy to establish & maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to humans

Image by Laz Georgoulas from Pixabay

In an article for The Conversation, University of Leeds researcher Derek Mitchell writes:

“Swarming honey bees send out scouts to find suitable nests, measure them for fitness against a list of criteria such as height off the ground, volume, entrance size, and entrance location. They communicate this information to the rest of the scouts. Then the scouts engage in a voting system to select the best one and move the entire swarm sometimes over a kilometre to the new nest.”

Thus, we find that democracy — a system of decision- and rule-making that most efficiently encompasses the collective wisdom of the group — is a survival system found in almost all aspects of nature. For humans, it’s every bit as important as technology, science, and economics.

Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.” 

And, like honeybees, we get there through voting.

This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.

It got him into a fight with the Declaration’s main editor, John Adams, who thought it should say “the Christian God,” but Jefferson prevailed. His deist friends George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Ben Franklin knew what he meant: nature and “God” interpenetrated each other, and they saw the result of that in the democracy — the balancing systems that produced ecological resilience — in nature.

And, I discovered when researching my new book The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But was he right? Is nature actually democratic? Or was Mitchell’s observation about bees the exception?

Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in mammals.

We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decision, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old. The leader knows best, we believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.

But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.

“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”

Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”

They and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.

“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.

Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”

What they found was startling: Red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.

“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.  

With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.

Dr. Tim Roper told me:

“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”

I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.

He was emphatic:

“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“

Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.

When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Orbán-like dictatorships.

Similarly, research on pre-European-contact Mesoamerican societies published by archeologists Gary M. Feinman and David M. Carballo validates the extensive claims by America’s Founders that I cited in my new Democracy book: the most resilient and longest-surviving aboriginal and indigenous societies were also the most democratic.

Citing a 2018 study they’d published of 26 pre-contact Mesoamerican cities, the researchers were every bit as explicit about humans as had been Conradt, Roper and Randerson about the red deer:

“We found that more than half of them were not despotically ruled and that the more collective political centers had greater resilience in the face of droughts and floods, and warfare or shifts in trade. Cities that addressed their social challenges using more collective forms of governance and resource management were both larger and somewhat more resilient than the cities with personalized rulership and more concentrated political power.”

Digging deeper into the archeological record in the five years since that publication, they wrote this month:

“In a later study that included an updated and expanded sample of 32 well-researched Mesoamerican cities, we found that centers that were both more bottom-up and collective in their governance were more resilient.”

Thus, the kind of bottom-up democracy advocated by the majority of Americans — where the largest number of people can vote, pluralism is encouraged, and the will of the people is respected (while minorities’ rights area protected) even when it means your party loses power — has sustained America through most of our history (and has been continuously improved, in fits and starts, through the progressive enfranchisement of African Americans, women, and naturalized immigrants).

On the other hand, restricting democracy by making it harder to vote, concentrating political power from the top-down, and using hate and demonization of racial, religious, and gender minorities to acquire and hold political power leads a society straight toward autocracy, fascism, and — most importantly in this context — a loss of cultural, political, and societal resilience.

Derek Mitchell notes that honeybees probably evolved their modern system of finding an appropriate hollow tree eons ago in response to a radical shift in their local climate. Referencing the complex work processes bees go through in their selection of a place to nest, he added:

“This tells us that these nests were not that common, even 600,000 years ago. However, the survival advantages warrant investing enormous amounts of energy in finding them.”

There’s probably a similar point in time when virtually every social species confronted environmental challenges that led to their developing democratic behaviors. Or perhaps democracy has been encoded in the genes of most all life going all the way back to the earliest life forms having to work collectively for their survival like corals.

Nature has so many lessons to teach us; unfortunately, our modern civilization seems hell-bent on disrespecting and gutting the natural world. The more successfully we can bend our cultures and religions to respect “Nature’s God,” the more we enhance the survival potential of our own species.