by Todd Tucker
He pulled out a small decanter, and Pete relented with a grin. The professor poured into his steaming mug a generous dollop of honey.
“God,” said Pete after a taste. “That really is good.”
“Told you,” said the professor. “That’s our ‘last taste of summer,’ batch, you’re lucky you got here in time.”
Pete put down the mug on the corner of the professor’s worn desk, and pulled out his copy of Hive Democracy from his briefcase.
“Ah,” said Healy. “Another fan.”
“It was fascinating,” said Pete. “Truly. Obviously I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
The professor waved his hand in the air. “It’s my third book on the subject, but the first time I’ve ever been asked on the Today Show. I’m the beneficiary of a provocative title, and I can thank my editor for that.”
“But you believe it, right?” asked Pete. “You believe the bees actually practice democracy like we do?”
The professor nodded his head skeptically. “Actually, I think they practice it a little better than we do. They almost always make the right decision, as a group; I’ve proved it experimentally.”
“And why do you think their system works so well?”
“This is something I’ve thought a lot about,” said Healy. “For one thing, the bees all have a common goal: survival. They are making life-and-death decisions together. And secondly, while they don’t all have the same information, they all have the same preferences. So when they truthfully communicate their information to each other, they always agree on the correct path.”
Pete nodded, waiting to hear more.
“This is your area of interest, correct?” said the professor.
“It is,” said Pete.
“And you’re with the Department of Agriculture?”
“Yes,” said Pete, almost forgetting his cover story. The Department of Agriculture had a sizable presence at Cornell, and provided large amounts of funding to the university. It was both a plausible cover story and one that would encourage Healy to cooperate.
“How long have you been there?” asked the professor.
“Less than a year,” said Pete. “And I’m a consultant. Haven’t really learned my way around the bureaucracy yet.” He was trying to head off any obvious questions about the agency that he wouldn’t be able to answer.
“I see,” said the professor, nodding. “Well, you must be important. Or working on an important project. I’ve worked with a lot of Ag Department folks over the years, and this is the first time one of them was able to take a charter jet to see me on one day’s notice.”
Pete didn’t respond. He doubted he could bullshit a man as smart as Healy, so he decided to let it hang there, and let the professor decide whether he wanted to help or not. While Pete’s motives might be a little mysterious, the professor couldn’t doubt his influence, or the power of his backers.
He sipped his tea and continued to look Hamlin over. “How about we go for a walk?” he said. “I can’t leave them alone too long out there,” he said.
“The bees?”
“No,” said Healy. “Grad students.”
* * *
They walked across an expanse of grass to where a path entered the woods. Pete followed the professor into the trees. The air cooled instantly when they stepped into the shade, and Pete could tell that just as the name of Healy’s honey had indicated, the end of summer in upstate New York was rapidly approaching.
“How much do you know about bees?” asked Healy.
“What I read in your book,” he said. “Queens, workers, and drones.”
A bee flew by them in the air.
“So what kind is that?” said the professor lightheartedly, pointing.
“A worker?”
“Good guess!” he said. “Odds are very good. Queens rarely leave the hive, and drones wouldn’t be flying around out here looking for pollen.”
“They don’t?”
“No. Drones are the only males in the hive,” he said. “Their only role is to impregnate a queen. Consequently, they are the only bees in the hive without a stinger.”
“Really?” said Pete. He was struck by the irony, the drones of the hive being the only “unarmed” members. Without giving away his real reason for visiting Cornell, that made him curious. “So how did the word ‘drone’ come to mean—”
“What it means now? In ancient times, we thought drones were lazy, because they didn’t leave the hive to seek food or do any work. The term came to be synonymous with a lazy, idle worker. Subsequently, the name ‘drone’ was given to mindless machines. Of course now—”
“Drones have evolved.”
“And the term along with them.” The professor was staring hard at him now, and Pete was eager to keep the conversation moving.
“What happens to the drones after they impregnate the queen?”
“They die. The penis and abdominal tissues are ripped out after successful mating.”
“Jesus.”
Healy knelt down and pointed to a bee on a purple flower.
“One of yours?” asked Pete.
“It’s not marked, but quite possibly.” They watched it climb over the outside of the flower for a few seconds, and then take off. It spiraled into the air and flew down the path.
“My old mentor, Professor Martin Lindauer, used to actually run after the bees when he observed them. They fly about six miles per hour, so you can keep up—although it’s not easy running through the woods while trying to keep your eye on a bee.”
“I can imagine,” said Hamlin. “Do you do that?”
“I used to,” he said. “Not so much anymore.” He stood up from the flower, and looked Pete up and down. Assessing him. “So you want to learn the language these bees use to communicate?”
Pete nodded. “I do.”
“You know what we call it?”
“The waggle dance.”
“Good!” said the professor, happy with his pupil. “That’s exactly right. But the waggle dance was discovered decades ago. By Karl von Frisch. He won a Nobel Prize for it. It’s been studied thoroughly ever since, well documented, debated, revised. You’ve got decades of research to draw from. What do you need me for?”
“My understanding,” said Pete, “is that the waggle dance is how they communicate the location of food supplies. But I want to know how they make decisions as a group, decide on objectives, prioritize their work. The democracy of the hive, so to speak. That’s what I want to learn about.…”
The professor nodded, and seemed to think it over. Another bee landed on the flower, and they again watched it collect pollen and take off, flying the same route as its sister.
“OK,” said the professor. “Let me show you a few things that might help.”
* * *
The path came out of the woods. At the edge of the clearing ahead was a wooden structure, looking much like a small road sign—although there were no roads anywhere near them, not even the sound of cars. Two scruffy graduate students stood by it, both with clipboards. Between them was a small video camera on a tripod, aimed directly at the board. As they got closer, Pete thought the board appeared to be moving.
Then he realized it was covered in thousands of bees.
“This is called a swarm board,” said the professor. “A swarm is group of bees that has left its hive. The swarm has but one job: to find a new location for a hive. And it’s a life-or-death decision.” Bees came and went from the swarm, a cloud of them swirling around the buzzing mass. Pete had always pictured beekeepers draped in white, protective clothing, with pith helmets and protective face masks. But everyone present other than him seemed unbothered by the tens of thousands of stinging insects that undulated in a mass in front of them. Everyone was dressed like the professor, shorts and T-shirts, not even gloves to protect them.
“Are they looking for a new home right now?” asked Pete. “They don’t look like they’re doing anything.”
The pro
fessor nodded. “The swarm is made up of about ten thousand worker bees. Of that, the oldest, most experienced bees—about three hundred—become scouts. They go out, look for suitable locations, and come back and communicate the location to the swarm.” Pete wanted to get a better look at the swarm but didn’t want to stick his face any closer.
“With the waggle dance?”
“Exactly,” said the professor. “But then they collectively decide, over a day or so, what the best location is.”
“And they get it right?”
“Always,” said the professor.
“What makes one location better than another?”
The professor nudged one of the grad students, who was staring into space. “Will, you tell him.”
“Height,” answered Will. “They want to be high off the ground so animals can’t get into it. Ideally, they want a small entrance, also to keep predators away. And volume. The bigger the better.”
“Good!” said the professor, slapping him on the back. The professor was obviously brilliant, Pete knew from his credentials. But he also clearly enjoyed working with young people.
Suddenly a bee stung Pete on his forearm.
“Ouch!” he said, sweeping the dead bee away. It fell to the ground. The pain spread through his arm as he looked down at the small black stinger that still protruded from his skin. He plucked it out and looked at the painful red spot that the bee had given its life for.
The professor smiled. “OK, now you’re really one of us!”
“You guys get stung too?”
“All the time,” said Will. “We’re just used to it.”
Another bee landed on Pete’s arm. He stayed perfectly still until it flew away.
“Feel like moving somewhere else?” said the professor.
“Sure,” said Pete.
“Let’s go look at their potential homes.”
* * *
They walked back into the woods down another path, Pete occasionally rubbing his arm where he’d been stung. When they came into a clearing, Pete saw another wooden structure, this time a box. A lone grad student was sitting in a chair beside it, sheltered from the sun by a large multicolored umbrella. She was in a beach chair, relaxed, her long legs crossed.
“We have four boxes set up like this all around the woods,” said Healy. “They’re all identical, except for size. One is forty liters, the others are fifteen.”
“This one?” said Pete, pointing.
“This one is not the forty-liter dream home,” said Healy. “This one is the small fixer-upper.”
“Do all the scouts look at all the sites?”
“No,” said Healy, “and this is what’s fascinating. The same scouts will visit this site over and over, bring that information back to the swarm. But in their communications, which are always truthful, the swarm will choose the right site.”
“How do you know which scouts go to which site?” said Pete.
“I’ll show you!” said Healy, and they marched forward.
The potential home was a small wooden box inside a three-sided shelter. But Pete couldn’t tear his eyes away from the young woman in the beach chair.
“Pamela!” said Healy. “My star pupil.”
She rolled her eyes at the praise.
“Tell our guest what you are doing.…”
“Watching and waiting…” she said, making a dramatic flourish with her hand. She then leaned back in the chair, folded her arms, and waited for Pete to react. She was blond, and tall—he could tell, even with her sitting down, by the length of her tanned, athletic legs. She had piercing blue eyes that she trained on Pete without mercy. He could tell that she was used to paralyzing guys like him with a glance, enjoyed the sport of it. The professor, an experienced observer of all things living, recognized what was going on and was amused.
Suddenly, she leaned forward. A bee had landed on the sill of the box, in front of the small hole that was the entrance. As it wandered inside, Pamela placed a small net in front of the opening.
When the bee came out, it was trapped. She pulled it away and gripped the bee by its wings. With her free hand she took a tiny paint brush, the kind you might use on a model airplane, and painted a tiny yellow dot on the back of the bee. She released the bee, and it flew away. The entire operation had taken extraordinary delicacy.
“That’s how we know, back at the swarm, which bees come from which box. Each has a different color.”
Pete felt pressure to say something, anything, to look intelligent, as Pamela leaned over to catch another scout bee that was leaving the hive.
“Doesn’t that bother them?” he said. “Getting held and painted?”
“No,” she said brightly, looking up at him and waiting for the bee to enter the net. “They don’t even know they’ve been caught.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Quality versus quantity is an ancient military debate. Is it better to have a few expensive weapons systems with exquisite capabilities, or vast quantities of less capable systems that can be thrown at the enemy en masse? Overwhelmingly, the history of combat teaches that quantity almost always wins over quality. Put three noisy, slow submarines against a quiet, modern submarine, and the slow submarines will probably win. Raise the ratio to 5:1, and the modern sub is doomed. It might shoot the first enemy, maybe even the second, but in doing so it will reveal its position and deplete its torpedoes. Similar logic can be applied to tanks, planes, and even platoons of infantrymen. This idea was first quantified in World War I by British military theorist Frederick Lanchester, who created Lanchester’s law: all things being equal, a twofold increase in combat units will result in a fourfold increase in combat power.
World War II proved the truth of Lanchester’s law again and again. The Germans produced better planes and tanks than the Allies. The Panzer and the Stuka were superior to anything the Allies could put together, especially early in the war. But the Allies’ sheer quantity, driven primarily by American manufacturing might, overwhelmed any German advantage. By 1944, the Allies were producing a ship every day, and a plane, incredibly, every five minutes. The Russians, too, always believers in the power of numbers, outmanufactured their enemies to the point that any German technological advantage was negated. The spectacle of the Soviet May Day parade was an annual manifestation of this philosophy, endless columns of men and munitions. Stalin summed it up memorably with his quote: “Quantity has a quality of its own.”
After World War II, however, the United States backed away from this proven philosophy. Unable to produce either vast quantities of arms or massive standing armies, due to both political and budgetary limitations, the United States banked on its technological prowess. The result was fewer and fewer platforms of ever-increasing power. This was true across all branches, as the Pentagon procured ever-more-expensive tanks, submarines, and airplanes. In a vicious cycle, as the cost of each platform went up, the number of them procured went down. Norman Augustine, former under secretary of the Army, theorized only partially tongue-in-cheek that by 2054, at the historic rate of increase, the entire US defense budget would be used to procure a single airplane. He suggested that it be used three and a half days a week each by the Navy and the Air Force, with the Marine Corps getting it once every leap year.
Study after study, and war game after war game, showed the preeminence of quantity over quality. A 2009 RAND study about an air war with China over the Strait of Taiwan speculated that the newest US plane, the F-22, was twenty-seven times more capable than the Chinese plane. The study further assumed that the F-22’s missiles, eight per plane, would be 100 percent effective, every one of them finding and destroying a Chinese plane. No matter. In the study, the Chinese launched eight hundred sorties of their vastly inferior jets on the first day and won the battle easily. But still the United States went on buying its incredibly complex, incredibly expensive, and incredibly scarce weapons platforms while their enemies built weapons that were more crude, but infinitely more deadly because of
their sheer numbers.
The advent of drones and the escalation of the Typhon threat forced the United States and her allies to reconsider. Unmanned craft could allow the United States to leverage huge quantities of munitions without putting millions of men in uniform. American manufacturing once again asserted itself, manufacturing thousands upon thousands of simple, low-cost drones. No single system in the drones was revolutionary; it was all tested and relatively low-cost technology. Each flew with relatively few sensors, a single bomb, and an elegantly reliable power plant. A single drone was not a formidable opponent; it was never designed to be. But hundreds of drones were terrifying. A swarm of thousands was unstoppable.
Teaching the drones the language of the bees proved the final piece of the puzzle. While it was by no means easy, Pete could see from the outset that it would work. He soon recruited many of the world’s greatest apiculture experts, although not Professor Healy himself, who seemed immune to the Alliance’s generous offers of support. Pamela, too, stayed at Cornell, but Pete saw her often when he visited the campus to pursue the mysteries of the bees’ language.
Soon they had converted the entire language of the bees into a grammar, and that into logic that they could program into the drones. It was an extraordinarily rich language, Pete found, and one that suited their purposes perfectly. Like the bees, his drones were all identical; they shared a complete unity of purpose, and they were making life-or-death decisions. They soon taught the drones to communicate with each other clearly, without radio signals of any kind, just with the motion of their flight. Where the bees sought sources of pollen and debated new sites for their hive, the drones sought targets, and prioritized the biggest and best of them before swarming upon them and killing them.
Pete first trained two drones to talk to each other at the Atlantic Test Ranges, one drone finding another so they could coordinate an attack on a target being towed by a Navy destroyer. Two months later, a swarm of twenty drones performed flawlessly at the Atlantic Test Ranges, taking down three remote-controlled ships and penetrating a cloud of countermeasures.
In parallel with the test flights, Pete scouted locations for the Pacific drone station. The ideal spot would be located centrally, would have at least three hundred days of sunshine a year, and would be isolated, so that no one would become curious as they constructed the airfield. It seemed like fate when he found Eris Island, an obscure medical research station that was already part of the federal inventory.