Time is Honey

214 snips

Feb 13, 2026

Sunil Nakrani, an engineer and PhD researcher who studied web infrastructure, tells how honeybee behavior inspired a server-allocation algorithm. He recounts chasing web crashes, collaborating with biologists, and mapping waggle-dance rules to servers. The conversation covers experiments with bees, the math behind the algorithm, and surprising real-world applications.

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ANECDOTE

Sunil's 9/11 Internet Awakening

Sunil Nakrani noticed major websites crashing after 9/11 and became obsessed with why high demand made the internet fail.
He traveled to Georgia Tech and knocked on Craig Tovey's door seeking help, starting the chain that led to the bee-inspired solution.

ANECDOTE

Cranberry Lake Bee Experiment

Tom Seeley and Craig Tovey ran controlled bee experiments at Cranberry Lake with painted bees and transparent hives.
They set up unequal sugar feeders to observe how bees allocate foragers between patches over time.

INSIGHT

Equalizing Round-Trip Time

Bees use the waggle dance to recruit others and shift forager numbers toward patches with shorter round-trip times.
The colony dynamically balances distance and crowding to equalize round-trip time and maximize nectar collection.

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In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck.

Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the architecture of the web, he was no closer to an answer. In desperation, Sunil sent out a raft of cold emails to engineering professors. He hoped someone, anyone, could help him figure this out. Eventually, he learned that the internet could only be fixed if he paid attention to the humble honeybee.

This is the story of the Honeybee Algorithm: How tech used honeybees to build the internet as we know it.

Special thanks to John Bartholdi, John Vande Vate, Sammy Ramsey, James Marshall, Steve Strogatz, Duc Pham, and Heiko Hamann.

We found out about this story thanks to our friends at AAAS, who run the one and only Golden Goose Awards. The award goes to government funded science that sounds trivial or bizarre, but goes on to change the world. The Honeybee Algorithm won a Golden Goose Award back in 2016 (https://zpr.io/ePxaaYja6YF4). Thank you to our friends there: Erin Heath, Gwendolyn Bogard, Valeria Sabate, Joanne Padron Carney, and Meredith Asbury.

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Latif Nasser
with help from - Maria Paz Gutiérrez
Produced by - Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Annie McEwen and Pat Walters
and Edited by - Pat Walters

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Videos -

Golden Goose Award video about 2016 winners (https://zpr.io/eXwTJKGL6F8S)

Books -

The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honeybee Colonies (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674953765) by Thomas D. Seeley (1995, Harvard University Press)
Piping Hot Bees & Boisterous Buzz-Runners: 20 Mysteries of Honey Bee Behavior Solved (https://zpr.io/tNDqkw372Rhr) by Thomas D. Seeley
And, Paths of Pollen (https://zpr.io/cqRPpAdGRwMi) by Stephen Humphrey. One of our former transcribers who we recently learned had hidden talents far beyond the invaluable work they did for us. This book is only tangentially related to the content in the episode, but super cool in its own right.

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