Recipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Karl von Frisch trans­lated the meaning of bees’ waggle dances, by which a hive com­pares incoming reports from indi­vidual bees about nearby food sources to make col­lective decisions. According to Alex Wright in his book Glut: mas­tering inform­ation through the ages, other studies have shown that while a single bee can retain a piece of data for up to six days, a hive, through this col­lective inform­ation man­agement enter­prise, can retain the same data for up to three months.

In the 1930s, author and entre­preneur Paul Otlet dreamt up an inform­ation retrieval system that seems to fore­shadow the modern world wide web.