Organisation Hive - an inside view
Organising and Organisation formation has frequently been seen in nature, for example migratory birds flying in a pattern, dogs joining other dogs in a barking contest, elephants moving in herds and also unknown people organizing for a candle march or helping at the time of a disaster. We need to understand the phenomenin of Organising in the negative sense also as it does take place in society and is very harmful like e.g. termites organizing to destroy, unknown people joining a two-some street-fight that can create a mob resulting in arson etc.
Hive is also a seat of an Organisation, that is simply wonderful.
The Organisation in the hive arises from the partial systems, because the co-operating bees (the sub-systems) give structure to the system though they neither have knowledge of the global situation nor have a blueprint for the complete pattern in mind. Each individual works (blind for the holistic pattern) to the local rules, the global pattern results from the interaction of these single individuals. Every single bee has the ability to perceive only a little part of the entirety of influencing stimuli, but the whole of bees appears as a “collective intelligence”. That’s why many people characterize a society of honeybees as a “super-organism”. A honeybee colony operates as a parallel processing system in which decision making is performed simultaneously by largely independent working individuals. For every single bee the evolution creates a genetic programme that results in behaviour which rises the inclusive fitness of the whole colony. That is the reason why the sum of all parallel decisions actually benefits the welfare of the community too. The work in and outside the hive has to be allocated to all members of the colony. At best this should be both flexible and efficient. A bee should not only be a flexible generalist for helping her sisters in case of need, but also a specialist to be efficient in solving a problem. At first glance this seems to be quite difficult to be both, but an intrinsic threshold “helps” decide whether the bee should perform a task or not. Each individual has an appropriate behavioural programme for every possible work in the hive as well as a fitting threshold. The difference is that each member of the colony possibly has a different and an in time changing threshold. For example if a particular bee has a high threshold for cleaning and the matching stimulus - a clean hive - is low, she will start performing another task instead of it, but if the enticement exceeds her threshold for tidying (because there is much cleaning work to do), she will work as long as the strength of the stimulus fall below. Thresholds are not fixed, they Change with increasing age (e.g. a young bee has a low threshold for cleaning and a high one for flying out to collect water, an old bee vice versa), but they are also dependent on the strength of stimulus. In case of urgent need (because something is damaged inside the hive) the thresholds of all bees in the surroundings for repairing the damage descend as long as there is a sufficient amount of workers performing this “unusual” task. This way the system is able to regulate and Organise itself without the necessity of a superior control centre.
Odor identity coding reveals parallel processing within the bee’s dual olfactory pathway
In the Feb. 11, 2013, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, scientists from the University of Würzburg published the first explanation of how honeybees are able to detect and orient rapidly to flower odors as they fly around.
The honeybee possesses about 60,000 olfactory receptors, located on its two antennae pathways. From there, the information is transferred to the so-called antennal lobe, where primary processing takes place in about 160 spheroidal structures, the olfactory glomeruli. Via two neural tracts, consisting of numerous individual nerve cells, the data are then sent to higher-order structures – the mushroom body and the lateral horn – for parallel processing of olfactory information. Odors play a major role in the life of honeybees. Bees smell through their antenna, the neurological and neurochemical means by which bees find flowers and know hive mates.
Honeybees smell using a parallel processing system. The bee senses two odor signals through different nerve pathways at the same time. This mechanism speeds up the response time for the detection of flowers, hive mates, and enemies. The two sensory channels were found to be definable as a “what” and “when” pair pathways by the scientists. One pathway tells the bee which odor it currently perceives while the other pathway provides the respective temporal information. From this information, the animal can derive with precision where the odor originates. However, the scientists also found some differences between the tracts: One transmits information in a very general way – each single nerve cell that it is composed of responds to a diverse range of odors. The other one works in a rather more specific way: In this tract, individual nerve cells are responsible for only one odor or just a few odors. On this pathway, the transmission takes a bit longer – albeit only in the millisecond range.
Human Organisations
Organisation managed as a Complex Adaptive System is very focused on its people. It is ‘very human-oriented, in that it recognizes that relationships are the bottom line of business and that creativity, culture and productivity emerge from these interactions’. Further Complexity Science ‘recognizes that the intelligence and sources of solutions to business problems are distributed throughout an Organisation and are not confined largely to the top’. However, it may not be easy to manage in a Complexity-based way, if a manager is used to the command and control way of doing things. ‘It is hard because it requires constant attention, including constant vigilance of one’s own behaviour and the behaviour of others.
