Recent studies have shown that ant colonies, somewhat counter-intuitively, use “noisy” communication to their advantage (paper). The studies suggest that noise allows self-organized systems generally, and ant colonies in particular, to adapt flexibly in changing environments. This can best be explained using an information-theoretic approach to quantify how quickly information about the environment spreads through a colony. We will study this phenomenon by developing simulations of known biological experiments that allow us to directly measure the information throughput. We will extend these simulations to predict results of yet-to-be-conducted experiments.