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"Quorum sensing" in honeybees: pheromone regulation of division of labor
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International audience. Social insects live in colonies; each colony, composed of up to hùndreds of thousands or evenmillions of individuals, called workers, behaves as a single integratedentity. A colony reproduces as a unit, and its properties are believed to result from selectionmainly at the level ofthe whole colony (25).Although social insects possess brains capable of sophisticated cognitive functions (22), it is unlikely that an individual colony member has the capacity to acquire and integrate information on the global state ofits colony and how that changes as a result of changing internaI and external conditions (28). One ofthe central problems in social insect biology, therefore, is that ofcolony integration: how the activities of thousands of individual workers are integrated to form a productive colony (37). Colony integration in the insect societies has been studied· intensively, and much has been learned about the mechanisms by which it is governed (4, 5, 32). Several different types of group decision-making activities in insect societies appear to be regulated by processes similar to quorum sensing in bacteria, includingdecisionsonnest sites (32a) and the allocation of labor to different activities.. Identifyingcommonalities · in the social behavior of social insects and microbes might provide ideas on social regulation in general. Studies of sorne species of microorganisms have revealed that the core elements of sociality-altruism and division oflabor-are possible without a brain at aIl (7,29). This chapter teviews our understanding of the regulation of division of labor in honeybee colonies from the perspective of quorum sensing.
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