Re Peter's point of the "sharing" not being deliberate:  Lack of deliberate cooperation does not mean there is no benefit derived from proximity of colonies.

There may be an overall net gain (or loss) from that proximity based on different factors.  And those factors, while perhaps constant for the species, may have different relative importance depending on highly local, seasonal, or management considerations.  That is what I am interested in learning more about.

Drifting foragers entering the "wrong" colony are an example: I have often seen that described as "begging" their way in. Is that what's really happening? Do they have be supplicants to get in, or are they bribing their way in simply by bringing resources? What would be the individual bee-level benefit of that - and what is the respective benefit for both of the involved colonies? Or, based on this polydromy study in ants that Peter linked to, do they enter freely, off-load their cargo and then transmit the forage data to their hosts as recompense for the permission to enter?  Or is there some very strong behavioral link that mandates info transmission after delivering a cargo, no matter where that delivery may have occurred even, theoretically, in a competitor's lair?

I had no idea about this returning forager behavior, and I find it very intriguing.  I have only been studying robbing behavior (or the curious lack of it in my own, very closely spaced apiary).  That lack doesn't square with what I have read about bee behavior in mixed-sized yards. I have spent many hours watching the interior guarding-behavior from a blind with a peep-hole that allows me to see what's going on just inside the upper entrance. (That's the preferred entrance in many of my big colonies - and luckily puts the entrance right at eye level when I am sitting on a stool in the blind.)

I am pondering about how I could use marked foragers to see if there is a difference in guarding-behavior depending on whether the entrant is a home-bee, or not. Up until now, I haven't done any wide-spread marking because I thought it might make the individual foragers more prone to predation when out of the hive. But that's an interesting possibility for this summer.
       
 Nancy
    

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