Social-insect colonies often act coherently without centralized control, yet coherence alone does not establish collective intelligence. Rapid environmental change creates a harder problem: information must be acquired, filtered, amplified, revised, and sometimes discarded before it becomes obsolete. This perspective develops a proposed behavioral-systems account in which collective performance emerges from the coupling of distributed sensing, local state-dependent processing, recruitment, quorum formation, heterogeneous response thresholds, and corrective feedback. Evidence from ants and honey bees shows that workers can extend group sensing through interaction, alter responses according to physiological and social context, learn components of communication, and combine positive recruitment with inhibitory signals. The same literature also shows limits: stronger activity does not necessarily improve exploitation, consensus can trade quality for cohesion, and heterogeneity is beneficial only conditionally. We therefore argue that collective intelligence should be evaluated as a time-sensitive systems property rather than as an intrinsic attribute of eusociality. The proposed framework predicts that colonies should perform best when information acquisition, amplification, inhibition, and response thresholds remain matched to the rate at which environmental conditions change. Its generality remains to be tested beyond the ant- and honey-bee-dominated evidence base.
