A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.
Memetic Algorithms is a population-based approach for heuristic search in optimization problems. They have shown that they are orders of magnitude faster than traditional Genetic Algorithms for some problem domains.
M. Aehnelt, H. Diener, and A. Müller. Tagungsband 10.~Fachtagung Digital Engineering zum Planen, Testen und Betreiben technischer Systeme, 16.~IFF-Wissenschaftstage, page 139--146. Magdeburg, Fraunhofer-Institut für Fabrikbetrieb und -Automatisierung (IFF), (June 2013)
M. Aehnelt, H. Schulz, and B. Urban. Advances in Visual Computing: 9th International Symposium, ISVC 2013, Rethymnon, Crete, Greece, Proceedings, Part II, volume 8034 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, (2013)