I vaguely think that the lesson is not that complex behaviours can emerge from simple rules, but that some behaviours aren't as complex as they seem. There's a sense in which those beehives are actually very simple, but we don't see them that way.

They're not complex in a Kolmogorov sense, for sure.

What's more of a mystery to me is what metric we instinctively use for complexity.

Good point!