Age Polyethism for Hive Duties in Honey Bees — Illusion or Reality?

Abstract

Recently Seeley (1982) claimed that bees working inside the hive exhibit three age castes: cell cleaning, brood care, and food storage. In a subsequent paper, Kolmes (1985) stated that “honey bees do not appear to pass through a temporal sequence of tasks while performing hive duties” and that previous findings of this age polyethism are due to subjective interpretations of data. Here we report new behavioral data and statistical analyses substantiating the claim that age polyethism exists in bees working inside the hive. We followed a cohort of bees until they were 15 days old; they underwent two behavioral transitions. The first took place when the bees were approximately 3–4 d old and was associated with a switch from cell cleaning to other activities, mainly in the broodnest. The second occurred when the bees were approximately 10–12 d old and was associated with a switch from brood care to food‐storage activities and foraging. Thus we present strong statistical evidence of a cell‐cleaning age caste and a brood‐care age caste for bees, but further evidence is needed to demonstrate fully that bees also pass through a distinct food‐storage age caste before starting to work outside the hive. In addition, we demonstrate that Kolmes‘s previous denial of age polyethism in hive workers was caused neither by unusual behavior of his bees nor by weakness of his Kolmogorov‐Smirnov statistical test, but by sampling errors due to a small but critical flaw in his method of labelling bees.

In-hive patterns of temporal polyethism in strains of honey bees (Apis mellifera) with distinct genetic backgrounds

“…Three hundred newly emerged workers of each selected strain and the commercial controls were uniquely marked with plastic numbered tags (Honig Müngersdorff) glued to the thorax. A paint mark (Testors Enamel) was placed on the abdomens to differentiate bees from two experimental replicates and facilitate identification of tagged bees when their thoraces were obscured in a comb cell (Seeley 1982; Seeley and Kolmes 1991). Tagged workers were introduced to a four-frame observation hive (hereafter referred to as hive 1, see below) within 12 h of emergence.…”

“…Middle-aged bees typically perform food processing, nest construction, and guarding. Finally, older bees progress to foraging outside the nest for food (Lindauer 1952; Seeley 1982; Winston 1987; Seeley and Kolmes 1991; Johnson 2003, 2008, 2010). The final shift from within-nest tasks to foraging is one of the most easily recognized and commonly studied transitions and is often used as a benchmark measure for the pacing of temporal polyethism.…”

“…The final shift from within-nest tasks to foraging is one of the most easily recognized and commonly studied transitions and is often used as a benchmark measure for the pacing of temporal polyethism. However, prior behavioral transitions are also essential to colony function and may have an impact on the transition to foraging (Seeley 1982; Calderone and Page 1991; Seeley and Kolmes 1991; Pankiw and Page 2001). …”

Polyethism in an Oriental Hornet (Vespa orientalis) Colony

“…Elsewhere, various species of termites are characterized by age, caste, and sexual polyethism [20][21][22][23], while ants display age and caste polyethism [24][25][26][27]. It is also known that honey bees (Apis mellifera) show a tendency to perform different types of activity at different ages [28][29][30][31][32]. Investigation of age-dependent division of labor in five species of Vespa (simillima, analis, crabro, mandarinia, and tropica) [33] has shown no relationship between age and labor.…”

Temporarily social spiders do not show personality-based task differentiation

“…Individual behavioural specialization can arise through a variety of mechanisms: environmental and genetic factors can play a role (Schwander, Lo, Beekman, Oldroyd, & Keller, 2010) as can age, sex or body size (Schwander, Rosset, & Chapuisat, 2005;Seeley & Kolmes, 1991), and differentiation can be accompanied by discrete polymorphism (Holldobler & Wilson, 1990;O'Riain, Jarvis, Alexander, Buffenstein, & Peeters, 2000). Furthermore, task specialization can occur in species in which group members are morphologically similar and belong to the same age class and sex (Gordon, 1996).…”