ABSTRACT
A honey bee colony manages to react to countless changes in the forage pattern outside the hive and internal changes inside the hive through a decentralized and sophisticated communication and control system. According to Seeley, a honey bee colony can thoroughly monitor a vast region around the hive for rich food sources, nimbly redistribute its foragers within an afternoon, fine-tune its nectar processing to match its nectar collecting, effect cross inhibition between different forager groups to boost its response differential between food sources, precisely regulate its pollen intake in relation to its ratio of internal supply and demand, and limit the expensive process of comb building to times of critical need for additional storage space [1]. A bee colony demonstrates this flexible and adaptive response because it is organized with morphologically uniform individuals but with different temporary specializations. A bee takes up four roles during her life span — cleaner, nurse, food-storer, and forager. The foragers could be further recognized as nectar, pollen, and water collectors [1]. They have two functional roles within each sub specialty: scouts, who discover new food sources around the hive, and foragers, who transport nectar from an already discovered flower site by following the dances of other scouts or foragers. The colony brilliantly allocates, through its communication and control system, its labor force among these individuals to maintain a balance between collection and processing rate of each commodity, as a result, an optimum stock of nectar, pollen, and water is piled inside the colony. On an average, a colony extracts from its environment around 20 kg of pollen, 120 kg of nectar, 25 l of water, and 100 g of resin each year [1].
