Task partitioning in honey bees: the roles of signals and cues in group-level coordination of action

The ecological success of the social insects depends on their ability to work with a unity of purpose. Task partitioning, breaking a task into subtasks performed by different individuals, is a key adaptation requiring group-level coordination of action. This study explores the communication processes that underlie task partitioning, focusing on the contrasting roles played by signals and cues. A fundamental problem of task partitioning is maintaining equal work outputs between the groups involved. Honey bees clearly use 2 mechanisms, and possibly a third, to achieve this goal. First, colonies make preemptive changes to their labor allocation by sending signals that are predictive of future work needs. Second, colonies are able to take measures to recalibrate the number of workers assigned to groups after unpredictable changes in work demand. Finally, colonies may be able to fine-tune the number of workers in task groups by modulating the activity rate of workers in time with changes in work demand. Based on this review of task partitioning, it is argued that signals are preferable to cues in some instances because they can be actively targeted to their recipients, as opposed to cues, which are passive sources of information. Furthermore, a recipient's behavioral state (active or inactive) does not affect their ability to receive signals, whereas it can for many cues. The results of this study should be broadly applicable, as wasp, bee, ant, and termite societies face similar problems and because data suggest that other social insects use similar communication mechanisms to bees. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.