Last week, my neighbor’s boy, a precocious middle schooler with floppy blond hair and an obsession with action characters, told me lots of animals make swarms, not just honey bees. He made sure I knew about starlings and sardines, mosquitoes and wildebeests.
As he segued into an inventory of LEGO pieces lost and never found, I thought about those collective pronouns for creatures in crowds. A murmuration of starlings. A clowder of cats. A murder of crows. Words surely coined by English majors, not biologists. I could imagine those starlings, undulating in their thousands, folding and layering like a silk scarf in a zephyr, swirling, surging, spiraling. But swarming? Not quite.
An introduction to collective motion
Many animals form impressive collective units, flying, swimming, running, or crawling in perfect unison, each individual moving with stunning speed and accuracy, never colliding, missing a cue, or wandering in the wrong direction. “How cool is that?” we think.
But several factors separate honey bee swarms from other balletic groups, including their purpose, democratic decision-making, and duration. Let’s consider honey bee swarms and then peek at some other types of collective motion.
The honey bee difference
You could define a honey bee swarm as a temporary, reproductive migration of a portion of a honey bee colony. If the swarm succeeds in establishing a fresh colony in a new location, it disbands as if it never existed. But if the swarm fails for any reason, it may return home, trying again later when the majority-controlled populace decides the time is nigh.
In a way, honey bee colonies produced by swarming (or splitting) resemble plants more than animals. When you take cuttings from your favorite begonia and tuck them into a pot, you’ve made an asexual split. When you remove part of your favorite bee colony and insert it in a new hive, you’ve done the same thing.
Of course, sexual reproduction also plays a part in honey bee colonies, but it’s a separate step, in a remote location, within a different kind of group. Stay tuned …
