Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London and Royal Holloway have discovered that bees learn to fly the shortest possible route between flowers even if they discover the flowers in a different order. In doing this they are effectively solving the challenging 'Travelling Salesman Problem' and despite their small brains are the first creatures discovered who can do this.

I have collaborated with Jeff Peel and his Business Evidence Thought-Leadership blog to produce a new 4-minute video on Natural Teams - how we can use simple ideas from nature, sports teams and families to radically improve our work teams.

I spoke at the inaugural TEDx event in Belfast on March 23 on "The 7 secrets of High-Performing Teams". Here is a link to a nice blog post by Alan in Belfast on the whole Belfast TEDx event with a collection of short video interviews with all the speakers.

Brainz.org has a very good article which gives 15 excellent examples of designs inspired by nature (biomimicry or biomimetics).

I would just like to thank the many people who expressed their interest so enthusiastically in The Bioteams Practitioners Network and to let everyone know I have their contact details and will arrange a time to talk before the planned launch in the New Year. Also if you missed it here is the link to the original post. Best Regards Ken Thompson

Are you smarter than a goose? Sure you are -- one on one. But when it comes to working efficiently, you and your colleagues can't touch the gaggle. According to author Ken Thompson, geese and other animals that naturally form groups have a lot to teach us about business. In a theory he calls organizational biomimetics, Thompson lays out the principles underlying nature's management strategies. So what can you learn from a bird or an ant? Take a gander. Katharine Gammon at Wired Magazine reports.

Ken Thompson, author of Bioteams and The Networked Enterprise, gives a 25 minute introduction to bioteams and describes how it can be applied to make social networks, fan groups, virtual communities and business networks more agile, intimate, satisfying and sustainable. The presentation also addresses todays big question - "How do you get engagement in a large group?"

In a BusinessWeek Special Report, February 2008, Matt Vella reports on how Janine Benyus, dean of the burgeoning "biomimicry" design movement, helps companies look to the natural world to help take their business green.

Janine Benyus, talking at TED, describes biomimicry as learning an idea from an organism and then applying it - the conscious emulation of life's genius. Bioteaming, then, is the biomimicry of social structures- taking ideas from Nature about how groups perform and intra-operate, and applying them to enhance how we humans work together in groups and teams. Doug Philips aka teamite#222* and bioteams guest author muses.

Rory Cellan-Jones reports on Inscentinel, a young British company, which trains bees to detect explosives without harming them The bees are trained by rewarding them with sugar whenever they detect the target substance.

New Scientist magazine reports that with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids" and the emergence of multicore chips, evolutionary or genetic algorithms are now developing better designs than human designers. However there are concerns that some of these designs may be unpredictable as no human designer knows exactly how they work.

Dancing bees help businesses describes how researchers at Cardiff University have developed an algorithm based on the honeybee waggle dance to help companies optimize their business processes.

The Center for Biologically-Inspired Design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have announced a conference in Biologically Inspired Design in Science and Engineering on May 10-12.

Learning from mother nature's designs becomes scientific mainstream

A new scientific discipline biomimicry (also known as biomimetrics) is gaining a lot of attention.

Defined as "taking ideas from nature and implementing them in another technology such as engineering, design, computing, etc."