In computer science and operations research, the bees algorithm is a population-based search algorithm which was developed by Pham, Ghanbarzadeh et al. in 2005. It mimics the food foraging behaviour of honey bee colonies. In its basic version the algorithm performs a kind of neighbourhood search combined with global search, and can be used for both combinatorial optimization and continuous optimization. The only condition for the application of the bees algorithm is that some measure of distance between the solutions is defined. The effectiveness and specific abilities of the bees algorithm have been proven in a number of studies.