Heritable personality traits have been widely recognized in human
behavioral sciences and in animal husbandry, but only recently is it
recognized that such traits are probably ubiquitous in animals and
behavioral correlations are important for understanding animal
behavior.

As many behavioral traits have a considerable genetic basis, it is
important to study how far these behavioral syndromes are caused by
direct genetic correlation, i.e., whether natural variation in a suite
of behavioral phenotypes can be traced back to variability in the same
genes.

The foraging behavior of honeybee workers seems to comprise such a
suite of correlated behavioral phenotypes. After initiation of
foraging in their second to third week of life, workers make several
decisions on each foraging trip by integrating their own behavioral
and physiological status, social colony stimuli, and the external
environment.

Selection for high pollen hoarding coincided with workers specializing
more in pollen collection, workers collecting heavier pollen loads,
performing more recruitment for pollen resources, and collecting
nectar of lower concentration.

However, a suite of seemingly unrelated behavioral differences between
the selection strains has also been demonstrated: high pollen-hoarding
bees mature faster to become foragers, they have higher locomotory
activity upon emergence, and they perform better at various learning
tasks.

[The] data present overwhelming evidence for pleiotropic effects of
previously identified quantitative trait loci for foraging behavior
and epistatic interactions among them

-- 
The Genetic Architecture of Sucrose Responsiveness in the Honeybee
(Apis mellifera L.)
Olav Rueppell, et al

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