What Honeybees Can Teach Us About Gang-Related Crime

There is a mathematical model in the field of theoretical ecology that describes how honeybees and chimpanzees and lions divide up space. In the grand competition for limited resources – i.e., dinner – bee colonies and prides of lions will generally create non-overlapping territories. Boundaries form between one group and the next, as the least bit of competition arises between them, and invariably that boundary sits smack in the middle between the beehives (or lion dens) on either side of it.

All of this sounds a little too simplistic to describe human behavior. As humans, we’d like to think that we rationalize our actions, that we fit them into more complex worldviews than a honeybee could ever contemplate (example: I believe in the importance of small businesses, therefore I shop at the local mom-and-pop corner store). But P. Jeffrey Brantingham, a professor of anthropology at UCLA, believes that human behavior is often far more predictable than we think. And as it turns out, those same spatial Lotka–Volterra competition equations that explain honeybee behavior appear to explain some territorial human behavior, too: specifically, that of rival urban gangs.