At 9:00 +1300 2/24/02, Robt Mann wrote:
>  So do bees actually " decide" how hard they will go out and gather on the
>basis of how much stores they have?  Do they " know" how much honey
>they have stored for winter?  How?  Is there a chemical stimulus involved ?
>Or am I just fooled here and the other hives have put their 10 kg in the
>brood nest too?

I believe that honey bees will gather honey just as long as it is
available. Whether they put it in the supers or the brood nest has to
do with a variety of factors. Things that favor putting the honey in
the supers include: heavy honey flow, strong colony, no queen
excluders, etc. Things that favor honey ending up in the brood nest
include: slow honey flow, weak colony, queen excluders, and the
shortening of days. But I do not think they will stop gathering honey
when "they have enough".

If they run out of room, they may stop because the foragers have no
where to put the nectar. If this condition goes on for a while, they
will fill the brood nest with honey and even build comb outside.

Now none of this takes place with pollen. It has been discovered that
a colony of bees will stop gathering pollen when their stores of it
reach a particular critical mass. (Water is also gathered on an as
needed basis.) But how does an individual bee *know* that there is
enough pollen? This remains to be discovered but it does not appear
that a pollen forager does a complete inventory of all the pollen
cells (this would be very time consuming).

Are there pollen monitors that keep track of the stores and
communicate this info to the foragers? Don't know. One theory that
has been advanced is that a returning forager is given a sample of
the larval food and she could tell by the taste if it is rich enough.
If it lacks pollen, she would know she has to go back out for more.

This is one of the things that researchers like Tom Seeley study.
This may have no practical benefit to the beekeeping world, but in
this way our understanding of bee biology is increased.

PB