Social insect colonies use negative as well as positive feedback signals to regulate foraging behaviour. In ants and bees individual foragers have been observed to use negative pheromones or mechano-auditory signals to indicate that forage sources are not ideal, for example being unrewarded, crowded, or dangerous. In this talk I propose an additional function for negative feedback signals during foraging, variance reduction. This revealed by using principled stochastic solution of the finite system size dynamics. Since robustness is a key aim for biological systems, and deviation from target foraging distributions may be costly, we argue that this could be a further important and hitherto overlooked reason that negative feedback signals are used by foraging social insects, mirroring the use of negative feedback in electronic circuits, and other biological systems possibly including the brain.
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