Bees have evolved for 100M years. During this time an enormous amount of bees have lived and finding a shorter path between flowers is obviously a very strong evolutionary pressure.

Generally the bee species is a genetic algorithms supercomputer that have worked for a very long time to find good solutions to the traveling salesman problem. I'd guess your suggestion, that we should not even try to find the results of that 100M years computation, is based on some personal feelings ;-)