The study of ant colonies behavior and their self-organizing capabilities is of interest to knowledge retrieval/management and decision support systems sciences, because it provides models of distributed adaptive organization, which are useful to solve difficult optimization, classification, and distributed control problems, among others.

... In several species of ants, workers have been reported to sort their larvae or form piles of corpses – literally cemeteries – to clean up their nests. If corpses, or more precisely, sufficiently large parts of corpses are randomly distributed in space at the beginning of the experiment, the workers form cemetery clusters within a few hours, following a behavior similar to aggregation. If the experimental arena is not sufficiently large, or if it contains spatial heterogeneities, the clusters will be formed along the edges of the arena or, more generally, following the heterogeneities. and their similarity (including the hypothetical object carried by one ant) (Web Usage Mining Using Artificial Ant Colony Clustering and Genetic Programming, by Ajith Abraham and Vitorino Ramos)

more papers on collaborative filtering to look at.