When a hive gets crowded, workers rear a new queen and roughly half the colony erupts as a swarm, clustering nearby while scouts search for nest cavities. Scouts perform waggle dances proportional to site quality; dance vigor recruits more scouts to visit that site, a positive-feedback race decided by quorum sensing.
dance_duration ~ f(site_quality)
recruits(site) += vigor * quality * dt
quorum reached when votes(site) >= Q_threshold
- Colony congestion — crowding pressure that triggers the swarm eruption; higher values launch the cloud sooner.
- Scout count — number of scout bees searching and dancing for candidate nest sites.
- Dance vigor — how strongly a good site's waggle dance recruits fresh scouts (positive feedback strength).
- Site quality spread — how differentiated the candidate sites are; wider spread makes consensus converge faster and more decisively.
Quorum sensing (a critical number of scouts simultaneously visiting one site, roughly 15-20 bees) triggers the swarm's final "piping" and move to the winning cavity — a decentralised decision with no single bee in charge.