I think in Allen's case the bees are on average >14 days old. Bees go through cell cleaning, nursing, then receiving nectar and comb builders (also the rare tasks of guarding and undertaking) and finally foraging. So the bees outside the broodnests are about 14 days old and are making honey (drying water, or putting nectar into honey supers) and orientation flights happened about 4-6 days, so these bees do know where their hive is. I recently shook some bees from a hive 6 ft away (on open brood, make sure no queen) to a weak hive and most young bees walked into the new hive, instead of returning to their original hive! This is just opposite to Allen's situation... of course queen breeders know about this and this is how a "starter" colony is made to rear the queen cells -- lots of young bees from different colonies would stay in a nuc in the same yard. Regarding job changes -- nurses cannot simply go forage, because there are many physiological changes involved (juvenile hormone titers are higher in foragers, food glands shrink, amines change, to name a few), so we call this big behavioral switch "behavioral development" (it is not like they can forage one day and then nurse next day -- the changes are not easy and this "reversion" only occur under special circumstances). As Tom mentioned, Robinson and I developed the "social inhibition" model to explain the regulation of foraging age -- basically the age of first foraging is flexible and is dependent on social conditions (colony age structure). You can put all newly emerged bees together with a queen and some workers will forager on day 5-7! if you add some old bees in the same type of colonies, the precocious foraging is inhibited, suggesting there is a chemical (or behavior) from foragers inhibition young bees from becoming foragers... There is a very recently paper (2004, Naturwissenschaften) by Tanya Pankiw (Texas A&M) showing that forager-extracts do delay other bees' foraging age, essentially confirming our 1992 hypothesis. Cheers, Zachary Huang http://www.msu.edu/~bees :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: -- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/BEE-L for rules, FAQ and other info --- ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::