Abstract
A honey bee (Apis mellifera) queen mates with about ten haploid drones, thus producing colonies composed of about ten subfamilies of super-sisters. An increasing but controversial body of literature supports the views that: (1) Members of each subfamily within a colony can recognise each other, and distinguish supersisters from half-sisters. (2) Members of each subfamily use this recognition information and increase the reproductive fitness of their own subfamily at the expense of half-sisters through behaviour termed nepotism. A mathematical model is developed that shows that task specialisation by subfamilies, and bees that repeatedly undertake the behaviour within subfamilies, can influence the numbers of interactions among super-sisters, relative to the numbers of interactions between half-sisters. The model is then evaluated using a data set pertaining to trophallaxis behaviour in a two-subfamily colony. It is concluded that with this data set, task specialisation and subfamily recognition were indeed confounded, suggesting that the apparent subfamily recognition could easily have been an artefact of task specialisation.
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