Socialising
Fig. 2. Andreas Trepte
Social insect colonies are often thought of a collective group of simple cognitive units, which together gather information from the surrounding environment and respond accordingly. Honey bees are a subset of the genus Apis and cluster in large colonies to increase foraging, reproductive and survival success (Roberts & Harrison 1999). However as with any organism, temperature impacts the efficiency of every process occurring at both an individual and colony level. Honey bees have been shown to use the often negative effects of temperature fluctuations to their advantage, by eluding pathogens or predators and decreasing developmental brood times (Starks et al. 2004). Even so, the most impressive and important temperature-related requirement of honey bees is the maintenance of constant temperatures within their colony structures. Using a variety of mechanisms such as heat shielding and fanning, worker bees can cool or warm up the colony and broodcombs (Stabentheiner et al. 2010) . As with other eusocial bee species, each honey bee colony consists of one fertile queen bee, and a large seasonally variable population of sterile male workers and drones, and sterile female workers. Thermoregulation is only one example demonstrating the division of labour and responsibility amongst these castes, resulting in the coordination of individuals to perform a unified response.