Researcher's honeybee findings pollinate far flung tech fields

Anyone who was using the internet back in the early 2000s remembers the slow and sometimes never‑ending wait for a website to load, or the website crashing for inexplicable reasons. A recent Radiolab podcast sheds light on the intersection of a Pembroke man's lifelong career in honeybee research and the algorithm behind website server efficiency and the reason why websites no longer require patient waiting.

Dr. Thomas Seeley, the Horace White professor emeritus in biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, explains that he dedicated his scientific career to better understanding honeybees. "They are social insects that live in complex societies," he says, "and have evolved with solutions to complex problems."

One of those complex problems was the subject of Seeley's research in the 1990s: the waxing and waning of pollen sources and how hive members communicate with each other about which source to spend valuable time and energy on visiting. The honeybee waggle dance does just that, and if a rich and wonderful source of pollen is the subject of the dance, as each bee finds the site and returns to the hive, the more that particular site will get an enthusiastic dance. Less interesting sites will be visited, but given the number of bees waggling about the preeminent flower patch, the less desirable sites will attract fewer visits and subsequent dances.

Eventually, the glorious pollen site begins its inevitable depletion as all those bees visit. Gradually, other sites and the accompanying waggle dance of information begins to rise in numbers as the depleted site's dance begins to decline. Seeley explains that the colony uses its waggle dance to solve the problem of how to "wisely allocate foraging forces to varying flower patches."

The same behavior was applicable to the problem of internet servers and how to allocate power, which is exactly what a research team at Georgia Tech began to realize in the early 2000s when it examined the problem of servers crashing when overloaded with requests. As Radiolab explains, a website is hosted by a particular server, and if that server received more and more requests for that website, it was unable to handle the sudden surge and swamped. The waggle dance, used to recruit more bees to an irresistible pollen patch, became the basis of their research and that of others for what is known as the honeybee algorithm. While originally an individual server sent a website out to whomever requested it, without any help, the algorithm programmed servers to recruit other servers with a ping, or a waggle, to let them know they needed help with surging demand for a website, and then as demand began to wain and a new website trended, more pings were issued for help for the new demand.

"It took a lot of careful work," says Seeley, of understanding the waggle dance and his research that ended up influencing the design of server capacity. Each bee in his outdoor hive lab was labeled so that his research team could track how each advertised or didn't advertise a flower patch. When a member of the Georgia Tech crew came to visit Seeley's bee farm to see what they were doing, "I was delighted." His research has since been used many times. Radiolab notes that the honeybee algorithm has gone far beyond website server capacity and is now used to design cars, sharpen MRI imaging and much more.

Seeley, now retired and reflecting on his long career, is still enamored of "the complexity of the inner workings of a honeybee colony, and the way that these inner workings are amenable to analysis." The bees are large enough to be labeled for individual tracking and observing, and they don't mind living in glass‑walled observation hives. The work is more important than ever when considering the fact that out of about 500 species of bees in North America, it is the honeybee that is responsible for 80% of crop pollination "essential for about one‑third of our total food supply."

There are plenty of good mysteries for future investigations for the next generations of honeybee researchers and how those investigations may play a role in a wide range of problem solving. Seeley explains that no one knows how a colony decides "when to cast a swarm, or when it should fission itself, with the mother queen and about two‑thirds of the workers departing a hive to establish a new colony." Nor do researchers understand the mating behavior and orientation for "hook‑up sites" of virgin queens and drones that "fly off for several miles to very specific places about 200 meters in diameter where they meet and mate in the air."

An interesting hive question revolves around beeswax comb construction. "We know that 80% of the comb area is composed of relatively small‑diameter hexagonal cells that are used for rearing workers, and the other 20% of the comb area consists of markedly larger hexagonal cells that are used for rearing the big, strong drone bees. But how a colony gets these proportions right mystifies me."

The good news for researchers is that wild honeybee populations appear to be resistant to the varroa mite, which along with pesticide pollution has had significant negative impacts on commercial and backyard hives. Wherever there are honeybees in backyard or commercial hive operations, there will be at least as many honeybee colonies in hollow trees in nearby forests, Seeley says. "Interestingly, in the wild the colonies don't need [varroa mite] treatment. It's really good news." He adds, "Wild bees are showing us that there is a way."