SUBFAMILY RECOGNITION AND TASK SPECIALIZATION IN HONEY-BEES (APIS-MELLIFERA L) (HYMENOPTERA, APIDAE)

A honey bee (Apis mellifera) queen mates with about ten haploid drones , thus producing colonies composed of about ten subfamilies of super-s isters. An increasing but controversial body of literature supports th e views that: (1) Members of each subfamily within a colony can recogn ise each other, and distinguish super-sisters from half-sisters. (2) M embers of each subfamily use this recognition information and increase the reproductive fitness of their own subfamily at the expense of hal f-sisters through behaviour termed nepotism. A mathematical model is d eveloped that shows that task specialisation by subfamilies, and bees that repeatedly undertake the behaviour within subfamilies, can influe nce the numbers of interactions among super-sisters, relative to the n umbers of interactions between half-sisters. The model is then evaluat ed using a data set pertaining to trophallaxis behaviour in a two-subf amily colony. It is concluded that with this data set, task specialisa tion and subfamily recognition were indeed confounded, suggesting that the apparent subfamily recognition could easily have been an artefact of task specialisation.