Only if the house is filthy after a party will Angus be stirred to action. Together with colleagues in the Maths department, we are studying task allocation in social insects. In honey bees, task threshold is strongly influenced by paternity, and this may have an effect on task allocation. The underlying idea is that every individual does what it is best at. An example are the so-called hygienic bees.
Hygienic bees are bees that uncap cells that contain dead brood and remove it.
Whether or not a colony is hygienic depends on a large number of different factors such as the different threshold of different patrilines to react to the smell of dead brood. When more bees open cells, more bees are prone to remove dead brood resulting in positive feedback. Positive feedback is one of the most important characteristics of self organising systems. Social insects are a perfect model system to study self organisation because one can actually follow individuals and determine how their behaviour is affected, either directly or indirectly, by the behaviour of other individuals. Worker policing and worker reproduction in Apis cerana.