Clustering of related workers in the honeybee colony (Apis mellifera L.): adaptive process or inevitable pattern?

Individually labeled freshly emerged honeybee workers (Apis mellifera) from three unrelated source colonies were introduced into five host colonies. T he location of the workers during their first eight days of life was monito red. Workers from the same source colony tended to be found more often in t he same area of the comb than workers from a different source colony. Altho ugh kin recognition among workers cannot be ruled out as a possible mechani sm for this pattern, the results can be more readily explained by phenomena related to self-organized pattern formation, individual behavioral thresho ld Variability and genetically determined worker task specialization.