The allocation of foragers to a new foraging task in the stingless bee Plebeia tobagoensis (Hymenoptera, Meliponini)

摘要

Social insect colonies can adjust the distribution of forager labour over different foraging tasks in three ways: 1) unemployed or new foragers can be recruited, 2) workers that are employed in certain tasks can be recruited to other tasks, or 3) workers already foraging on a task can be activated to work harder (Rotjan et al. 2002). In this study we examined how colonies of the stingless bee Plebeia tobagoensis adjust their foraging forces when a new foraging task occurs. So far, in stingless bees no extensive research had been done on any of the processes involved in forager allocation. We found that most of the labour for the new task was supplied by recruiting non-foragers to this task. In the stingless bee P. tobagoensis the flexibility of colony foraging behaviour seems to be largely dependent on the recruitment of non-active foragers and not on the flexible behaviour of individual active foragers. When we assume that the recruited foragers were mostly unemployed before, the activation of these foragers seems to be a low cost solution for forager allocation in the case of the occurrence of a new foraging task.