Kristina Chyn is a 3rd year PhD student in Lee Fitzgerald’s lab. Kristina is broadly interested in conservation, landscape ecology, and herpetology.
For her dissertation, she studies the direct and indirect effects of roads on reptiles and amphibians in Taiwan and is conducting her fieldwork on a Fulbright fellowship (2016-2017).
She received her B.S. in Science of Natural and Environmental Systems from Cornell University before joining the EEB program at TAMU.
Title: “Collective intelligence in honey bees: How a swarm of bees chooses its home’ [summary]
Speaker: Thomas D. Seeley, Cornell University
Hosted by Juliana Rangel
Refreshments at 3:15
With the right organization, a group can overcome the cognitive limitations of its members and achieve a high collective IQ. To understand how to endow groups with collective intelligence, it is useful to examine natural systems that have evolved this ability. An excellent example is a swarm of honey bees solving the life-or-death problem of choosing a new home. A bee swarm accomplishes this through a process that was discovered in Germany in the 1940s, and that has been analyzed more deeply in recent years. It includes collective fact-finding, open sharing of information, vigorous debating, and fair voting by the 300-500 bees in a swarm that function as nest-site scouts.
© Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
