Can we please stop with these articles, that with due consideration I will refer to as "fucking pieces of shit"? My HP48-G could probably brute-force the instance size of the problems that they threw at these bees in less time than the bees took, and there is also no particular reason to believe that the bees actually solve the problem, which is to say, 100% of the time find the perfectly optimal solution. Anything less is not a solution.

There is a long history of people simply assuming that things could solve an NP-hard problem when in fact you only get an approximation: http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/npcomplete.pdf

Bees may not be dumb, but they work at the speed of living things. In one flap of the wings of one of the bees I bet a naive brute-force algorithm could have solved the entire instance these researchers threw at the bees with time to spare. TSP is exponential to truly solve, but I guarantee the researchers didn't throw a very big instance at the bees, because if they had I guarantee at some point the bees would have chosen a non-optimal path.

This isn't even abstractly cool; it's anti-knowledge of a kind with quantum mysticism, if not quite as toxic. Reading these types of reports and taking them at face value leaves you with a less accurate understanding of the world.