Ten years of painstaking research on how swarms of honeybees choose a new hive now shows their voting process for selecting new real estate is efficient and yields some losers while avoiding the folly of the collective, or of trying to come to a consensus.

The bees' approach might sound hardcore and less than democratic. But it almost always results in the choice of the best home among available options, said Thomas Seeley of Cornell University.

A better democracy

If humans were to take a page from honeybee home-hunting, we too could learn to minimize bad decisions, he said.

"How the scout bees select candidate sites, deliberate among choices and reach a verdict is a process complicated enough to rival the dealings of any corporate committee," Seeley wrote in a recent article in American Scientist magazine summarizing his research.

Seeley and his colleague, Kirk Visscher of the University of California, Riverside, tagged, observed, videotaped and experimented with swarms of up to 10,000 honeybees at Appledore Island in the Gulf of Maine.