Bees algorithm

These scout bees move randomly in the area surrounding the hive, evaluating the profitability (net energy yield) of the food sources encountered.

[8] Through the waggle dance a scout bee communicates the location of its discovery to idle onlookers, which join in the exploitation of the flower patch.

Thanks to this autocatalytic process, the bee colony is able to quickly switch the focus of the foraging effort on the most profitable flower patches.

The bees algorithm consists of an initialisation procedure and a main search cycle which is iterated for a given number T of times, or until a solution of acceptable fitness is found.

In the initialisation routine ns scout bees are randomly placed in the search space, and evaluate the fitness of the solutions where they land.

If no forager finds a solution of higher fitness, the size of the flower patch is shrunk (neighbourhood shrinking procedure).

Usually, flower patches are initially defined over a large area, and their size is gradually shrunk by the neighbourhood shrinking procedure.

As in biological bee colonies,[7] a small number of scouts keeps exploring the solution space looking for new regions of high fitness (global search).