Rise and Fall of the Epithelium

Abstract

The notion that a division of labour occurs in a honeybee colony has been entertained at least since Huber (1814) claimed that a wax-working class of bees handled wax while a ‘small’ or nurse bee class looked after the feeding of larvae. This assertion constitutes an early interpretation of specialised labour in the honeybee colony, but it was made quite independently of any consideration of the age of the bees that might belong to any one class. Still, the observation was made and then expanded by Dönhoff (1855) to include age in a rough way. He replaced the queen in a colony of German black bees with a lighter, yellowish Italian queen and saw the new progeny of the latter make their first play flights a week after emergence and only come to feeding dishes in his apiary after yet another week.