Individual differentiation in behaviour of honey bee workers (Apis meltifera L.)

Summary

Behavioural differentiation in honey bee workers has been the most important issue in papers on honey bee behaviour throughout the years. However, little is yet known about proximate factors leading to behavioural differentiation within worker honey bees of the same age group (idiosyncrasy). Although recently there have been many publications concerning the influence of genetic and physiological factors on worker behaviour, these factors do not provide proximate clues at the level of an individual. The aim of this paper is to describe behavioural differentiation within one age group of honey bee workers. These descriptions for more or less normal situations are necessary in order to make investigations with respect to the proximate factors leading to idiosyncrasy possible. Various methods have to be employed to describe and quantify these differences. The analysis of frequency distributions of involvement in a behaviour alone is usually not enough for this purpose.

Significant idiosyncrasy has been found for “comb construction”, “allogrooming” and some behavioural acts which occur in queenless colonies: “involvement in aggressive interactions” (both as “aggressor” and as “victim”) and “staying in empty cells”. The distribution of the number of times workers were allogroomed never deviated from random distributions. Also workers' “involvement in visiting larvae in emergency queen cells” was mostly random.