"The best and noblest bees are generated and bred out of the Lion, and the Kings and Princes of them do derive their pedigree and descent from the brain of the Lion, being the most excellent part of his body: it is no wonder therefore if they proceeding and coming from so generous a flock, do assail the greatest beasts, and being endures with Lion-like courage, do fear nothing." (Thomas Moffett, "Theatre of Insects", 1634)
"[….] a great number of […] living and thinking Particles could not possibly by their mutual contract and pressing and striking compose one greater individual Animal, with one Mind and Understanding, and a Vital Consension of the whole Body: anymore than a swarm of Bees, or a crowd of Men and Women can be conceived to make up one particular Living Creature compounded and constituted of the aggregate of them all."(Richard Bentley, "The folly and unreasonableness of atheism", 1699)
"Hence, following the comparison to a bee swarm, it is a whole stuck to a tree branch, by means of the action of many bees which must act in concert to hold on; some others become attached to the initial ones, and so on; all concur in forming a fairly solid body, yet each one has a particular action, apart from the others; if one of them gives way or acts too vigorously, the entire mass will be disturbed: when they all conspire to stick close, to mutually embrace, in the order of required proportions, they will comprise a whole which shall endure until they disturb one another." (Théophile de Bordeu," Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes et sur leur action", 1751)
"One could, following these authors, compare man to a flock of cranes which fly together, in a particular order, without mutually assisting or depending on one another. The Physicians or Philosophers who have studied and carefully observed man, have noticed this sympathy in all animal movements – this constant and necessary agreement in the interaction of the various parts, however disparate or distant from one another; they have also noticed the disturbance of the whole that results from the sensory disagreement of a single part. A famous physician [M. de Bordeu] and an illustrious physicist [M. de Maupertuis] likewise compared man, from this luminous and philosophical point of view, to a swarm of bees which strive together to hang to a tree branch. One can see them pressing and sustaining one another, forming a kind of whole, in which each living part contributes in its way, by the correspondence and direction of its movements, to sustain this kind of life of the whole body, if we may refer in this way to a mere connection of actions." (Ménuret de Chambaud, "Observation", Encyclopédie XI [by Diderot 318b-319a], cca. 1751 and 1772)
"Have you ever seen a swarm of bees leaving their hive? [...] The world, or the general mass of matter, is the great hive [...]. Have you seen them fly away and form a long cluster of little winged animals, hanging off the end of the branch of a tree, all clinging on to each other by their feet? [...] This cluster is a being, an individual, some sort of animal [...]. If one of these bees decides to pinch somehow the bee it is clinging onto, do you know what will happen? […] this one will pinch the next one; [...] as many pinching sensations will arise throughout the cluster as there are little animals in it; […] the whole cluster will stir, move and change position and shape […] someone who’d never seen the formation of a cluster like that would be tempted to think it was a single animal with five or six hundred heads and a thousand or twelve hundred wings [...]" (Denis Diderot," Rêve de D’Alembert", 1769)
"Ants exhibit a 'neuron-like' behavior insofar as inactive ants have a low propensity to become spontaneously active, but can become excited by other ants with whom they come into contact. [...] Conversely, ants are prone to lapse back into inactivity if their activation is not sufficiently reinforced, and even exhibit a short refractory period (similar to neurons) before they can be reactivated – a mechanism which keeps the swarm from getting permanently 'locked' into an excitatory state." (Georg Theiner & John Sutton, "The collaborative emergence of group cognition", 2014)
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