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Time is Honey

February 13, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Time is Honey

In 2001, a PhD student named Sunil Nakrani sat in a computer lab at Oxford, watching the internet break in real time. The September 11 attacks had just happened, and millions of people were flooding news websites, desperate for information. But the sites wouldn't load. Some crashed entirely. Others just kept spinning. Nakrani had a question that would haunt him: why is it that at the very moment when I and the whole world want to access something the most, that's when I can't access it?

The problem was a mismatch between demand and supply. A single server hosting a popular website could get overwhelmed when too many people tried to visit at once. Other servers sat idle elsewhere, but there was no way to move them around quickly enough. Nakrani became obsessed with finding a solution. He was a PhD student at Oxford, studying communication engineering, and he kept running into the same wall: how do you design a system for a future you can't predict?

One day, he walked into the office of Craig Tovey, a systems engineer at Georgia Tech. Nakrani described the problem. After about 25 minutes, Tovey stood up, walked to his desk, and pulled out a paper. He plopped it down in front of Nakrani. The title: "The Pattern and Effectiveness of Forager Allocation Among Flower Patches by Honeybee Colonies."

"Why are we talking about honeybees?" Nakrani asked.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (01:44) **The Internet's Breaking Point** - Sunil Nakrani, a PhD student at Oxford, experiences the internet crashing on 9/11 and becomes obsessed with why systems fail under sudden demand surges.
  • 2 (04:46) **A Chance Meeting with Craig Tovey** - Sunil, struggling with the internet problem, cold-emails Georgia Tech professor Craig Tovey, who invites him to his office.
  • 3 (06:20) **The Honeybee Algorithm** - Craig introduces Sunil to the idea that bees have evolved a perfect system for allocating resources in an uncertain world.
  • 4 (07:06) **Tom Seeley and the Wisdom of the Hive** - The story of the bee research begins with Tom Seeley, a Cornell neurobiology professor and world expert on honeybees.
  • 5 (12:17) **The Cranberry Lake Experiment (1991)** - Craig and Tom run a controlled experiment to observe the hive's collective decision-making.
  • 6 (16:30) **The Waggle Dance and the Feedback Loop** - The bees use the waggle dance to communicate patch quality, creating a self-correcting system.
  • 7 (20:14) **The Simple Rule** - The hive's "wisdom" boils down to a single, elegant rule: send more bees to whichever patch has the shortest round-trip time.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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

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