Honey bees are one of the most industrious creatures out there, and they make for a great analogy. With lots of hard work and effort, you’re sure to reach a sweet outcome.

Ok, so maybe that analogy is a little outdated. Now, technology engineers have taken the study of bees’ work ethics one step further to come up with a system that has revolutionized the way things are done in the web hosting industry, to the tune of an estimated $50 billion.

According to Thomas Seeley, a bee expert at Cornell University, industries like web hosting should copy the way honeybees forage and adopt their methods in order to become more efficient. Four engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology did just that and were awarded the Fifth Annual Golden Goose Award for their aptly named “Honey Bee Algorithm.”

The Honey Bee Algorithm details how honeybee colonies are organized to optimally forage for nectar, a pattern easily adaptable by web hosting companies to help streamline internet services.

Funny enough, the Golden Goose Award is presented to scientists who are funded federally to work on research deemed “silly, odd, or obscure” when first conceived, but which, intentionally or unintentionally, results in a major discovery that can be applied in real life.

Following three years of developing a mathematical model based on the behavior of the honey bees’ foraging patterns, lead scientists Craig Tovey and Thomas Seeley got together to test it at the Cranberry Lake Biological Station in upstate New York. The duo set up a controlled experiment where they were able to study 4,000 forager bees, each uniquely identified, as they went about collecting their nectar from artificial nectar sources. The results showed that the bees had evolved well enough to go about tackling their tasks in such a way that each individual bee gathers nectar at just about the same rate over time, and ensures the hive can adapt to changing nectar resources.

These initial results encouraged the Georgia Tech engineers to look at other ways nature’s self-organizing system can be adapted to help humans problem-solve. Since first publishing their work in 1993, they have gone on to share lessons about how these methods can resolve issues ranging from online retail order management in distribution centers to the efficient dispatch of transit buses.

In adapting this organization for web hosting, servers are analogous to foraging bees. When clients make server requests for data retrieval, it mimics the changing landscape of flower patches. The clients pay money, generating revenue for the hosting provider, i.e. providing nectar to those worker bees.

Now, each server can only run one application at a time, so when it comes to switching applications – just like the honey bees searching for a new source of nectar – there is downtime that needs to be taking into consideration; the greater the downtime, the higher the loss of profits for the company.

When the Honey Bee Algorithm is applied, hosting companies can boost their revenue and more efficiently allocate their server time. Each client can expect a boost in service as servers are optimized.

That’s why today, thanks to a team of scientists who carefully studied honeybees and dared to emulate their work patterns, we can all access websites quickly and more efficiently then ever.