The choice of a new nest site is ecologically critical for an insect colony. In swarm-founding social insects, or those that move as colonies from one site to another, this choice is one of the best-available examples of a distributed, nonhierarchical decision-making process in animals. In the few species of ants and bees that have been studied in detail, the main features of this collective decision making are strikingly similar, although some differences occur. Individual scouts discover potential nest sites and integrate multiple properties of these sites into assessments of their quality. The discovered sites then compete for a limited pool of nest-site scouts, and attrition of less-favored sites occurs by several mechanisms. Finally, the mass movement of the colony to the new site is triggered by a quorum-sensing mechanism when sufficient scouts are present at one of the alternatives. Movement itself is coordinated by different mechanisms in different insects.

中文翻译：

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社会昆虫在巢穴选择中的群体决策。

对于昆虫群落，选择新的巢穴在生态上至关重要。在群居的社会昆虫或作为殖民地从一个地点移到另一个地点的昆虫中，这种选择是动物分布式，无等级决策过程的最佳实例之一。在一些经过详细研究的蚂蚁和蜜蜂物种中，尽管存在一些差异，但这种集体决策的主要特征非常相似。各个侦察员发现潜在的巢穴并将这些巢穴的多种特性整合到对其质量的评估中。然后，发现的站点竞争有限的嵌套站点侦查器池，并且通过几种机制来减少较不受欢迎的站点。最后，当替代方案之一出现足够的侦察兵时，群体感应运动就会触发群体殖民地向新地点迁移。运动本身是由不同昆虫中的不同机制协调的。