> First of all, the travelling salesman problem is not actually about travelling salesmen; a solution has to work on an arbitrary graph, not just one that is co

> First of all, the travelling salesman problem is not actually about travelling salesmen; a solution has to work on an arbitrary graph, not just one that is constrained to the actual geometry of space. Not quite true, Euclidean TSP is also NP complete, so in a sense, working with real distances doesn't make the problem any easier to solve. Euclidean TSP is, however, easier to approximate, and that's really the point here: a good approximation is all that matters in practice, bees won't starve just because their solution is 0.5% worse than the optimal route.