Thoughts on information and integration in honey bee colonies

Abstract - Solving the puzzle of colony integration in honey bees requires understanding how a worker bee acquires the information that she needs to decide correctly, moment-by-moment, what task to perform and how to perform it. To help us understand how the bees inside a beehive acquire this information, I share some thoughts about information flow within honey bee colonies. These thoughts are based on recent findings about how a colony works as a unified whole in gathering its food. © Inra/DIB/AGIB/Elsevier, Paris