Bees have a similar problem to website servers: how to do a lot of work with limited resources in an ever changing environment. Usually lessons from biology are hard to apply to computer problems. Nature throws hardware at problems. Billions and billions of cells cooperate at different levels of organizations to find food, fight lions, and make sure your DNA is passed on.

Nature's software is "simple," but her hardware rocks. We do the opposite. For us hardware is in short supply so we use limited hardware and leverage "smart" software to work around our inability to throw hardware at problems. But we might be able to borrow some load balancing techniques from bees. What do bees do that we can learn from?

Appliances that:
* Ensures Non-Stop application availability
* Improves network and server maintainability
* Delivers Enterprise-grade gigabit content switching
* Offers true Application Acceleration
* Provides maximum throughput at minimal cost

A superb explanation by Theo Schlossnagle of how to deploy a high availability load balanced system using mod backhand and Wackamole. The idea is you don't need to buy expensive redundant hardware load balancers, you can make use of the hosts you already have to the same effect. The discussion of using peer-based HA solutions versus a single front-end HA device is well worth the read. Another interesting perspective in the document is to view load balancing as a resource allocation problem. There's also a nice discussion of the negative of effect of keep-alives on performance.

From the website:

The lbpool project provides a load balancing JDBC driver for use with DB connection pools. It wraps a normal JDBC driver providing reconnect semantics in the event of additional hardware availability, partial system failure, or uneven load distribution. It also evenly distributes all new connections among slave DB servers in a given pool. Each time connect() is called it will attempt to use the best server with the least system load.

Wackamole is an application that helps with making a cluster highly available. It manages a bunch of virtual IPs, that should be available to the outside world at all times. Wackamole ensures that a single machine within a cluster is listening on each virtual IP address that Wackamole manages.

In Client Side Load Balancing for Web 2.0 Applications author Lei Zhu suggests a very interesting approach to load balancing: forget DNS round robbin, toss your expensive load balancer, and make your client do the load balancing for you. Your client maintains a list of possible servers and cycles through them. All the details are explained in the article, but it's an intriguing idea, especially for the budget conscious startup.