Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
they returned. h ey were classii ed as having a pollen load, an easily
observable character, or having no pollen. h is was a crude distinction
because pollen foragers may also have nectar, and those with no pollen
could have contained water or been empty. Guards stand at the en-
trance of the nest with an easily identii able posture, wings held out,
mandibles open, and forelegs lit ed, and check the credentials (nest
membership) of individuals entering the nest by touching them with
their antennae. Undertakers remove dead bodies from the nest. Some
bees die inside the nest, but most die in the i eld. We placed dead work-
ers in the hive, waited for undertaker bees to pull them out of the hive
entrance, and collected the undertakers. Scouts on swarms were col-
lected by turning the test colonies into artii cial swarms using a tech-
nique I learned from Norman Gary. All the bees were shaken from the
hive into a box, and the queen was caged. h e bees and the queen were
placed in a cool, dark place overnight and fed sucrose solution. h e
next day, the queen was suspended in her cage approximately 1.25
meters of the ground, and bees were shaken from the box. h e workers
took l ight, detected the queen's pheromones, and settled on her in a
swarm. Within a short time, some bees initiated searches for new homes
and began performing recruitment dances providing distance and di-
rectional information to the nest sites they had discovered. We collected
G
U
N
P
S
Figure 3.5.
Relative proportion of bees of dif erent genotypes (dif erent patterns
of workers) that were collected engaged in guarding (G), undertaking (U),
collecting nectar (N), collecting pollen (P), or scouting on swarms (S).
