How do honey bees recognize their nestmates? Guard bees at the colony entrance encounter incoming bees and exclude, by grappling, biting or stinging, bees that don't belong in the colony. Guards recognize colony identity of an incoming bee by odors carried by the bee. These odors come primarily from the wax comb in the bee's colony.
A newly emerged bee carries no recognition odor and is acceptable in any honey bee colony. After it has walked around on the wax a while (no more than a few minutes) its surface chemicals have been modified. The wax absorbs some chemicals, removing them from the bee, and gives up other chemicals, adding to the bee's burden of surface chemicals.
Because all the bees in the colony walk around on the same combs, all bees in a colony carry essentially the same recognition odors. This simplifies life for the guard, as it needs to learn only one identity, rather than several thousand unique identities.
I am currently investigating the chemistry of the signals that indicate the identity of bees. Some of the signals may be hydrocarbons, while others may be fatty acids. For more information on this line of research, see these papers:
Breed, M. D. and Stiller, T. M. 1992. Honey bee, Apis mellifera, nestmate discrimination: hydrocarbons effects and the evolutionary implications of comb choice. Anim. Behav. 43:875-883.
Breed, M. D., Garry, M. F., Pearce, A. N., Bjostad, L., Hibbard, B., Page, R. E. 1995. The role of wax comb in honey bee nestmate recognition: Genetic effects on comb discrimination, acquisition of comb cues by bees, and passage of cues among individuals. Anim. Behav. 50:489-496.
Smith, B. H. and Breed, M. D. 1995. The chemical basis for nestmate recognition and mate discrimination in social insects. in Chemical Ecology of Insects II, R. T. Carde and W. J. Bell, eds. Chapman and Hall: New York. pp. 287-317.
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