Individual involvement in queen-attending of worker honeybees

Studies on the division of labour in honeybees have mainly been focused on behaviour that is performed by workers of different ages or genetic background. However, little is yet known about behavioural differenceswithin groups of honeybee workers. The aim of this paper is to establish whether queen attendance in honeybee colonies is a function of specialists among the workers within one age cohort in colonies with a natural number of partilines. Furthermore, I want to assess whether the duration of contact of individual workers with the queen is correlated with their involvement in other behaviour and, in the long term, with their differentiation into laying and non-laying workers after the colony becomes queenless.The individual involvement in queen attendance was studied by investigation of three parameters:

–	the number of separate bouts of performing the behaviour
–	the total duration of queen-worker contact
–	the constancy of the relative individual involvement.

I hardly found any indications that there is a significance differentiation for queen attendance.