Bees individually aren’t very bright. It’s estimated that each individual bee has only about a million cerebral nerve cells. When combined, however, a bee colony has about 100 billion neurons. Human individuals have 200 billion neurons. So, a bee hive might be about half as smart as you, but they know how to make honey. In the environment of the hive, each simple bee contributes to sophisticated thinking about strategies for food gathering and defense.
Thus, a hive of bees is capable of making honey although no single bee fully understands the process. And they don’t need to because a key aspect of hive intelligence is task specialization. A means of communication must exist for any task specialized group to work together effectively. It would in fact take much longer for a group of bees to produce honey if they all were tasked with identical duties. Only by specializing and communicating can the bees make honey so quickly.
Let’s start with Oracle, who named its early collaboration software BeeHive. The simplest, fastest way to make an entire organization smarter is for everybody to know what is going on. Technology has made it possible to communicate quickly to the entire organization and to subsets within the organization. Specialization does mean that not everybody has to know everything but when it comes to hive intelligence it’s better to communicate too much than too little.
Absolutely. Networking & collaboration apply to every segments of living: business, family, entertainment and more. I have consistently insisted that there is a level of deficiency in every man.