Lloyd Spear wrote in "foraging behavior" thread:
"...In his outstanding book The Wisdom of the Hive, Thomas Seeley discusses
the
organization of foraging behavior in single hives and reports that while
most bees in a hive will forage together (in the same general area and on
the same plants), not all will do so...."

see "Distributive Control Models for Honeybee Decision Making During
Foraging" online at
http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Entomology/courses/en507/papers_1997/vos.html
by Bud Vos of Colorado State University...from the abstract:

"How does a whole honeybee colony discriminate, and direct activity to,
different food source locations via the dynamic
behavior of thousands of individuals? The answer to this question goes to
the heart of self-organization theories for social insect
behavior studies, yet it remains a mysterious and disputed topic. Numerous
sources cast honeybee colonies as
superorganismal systems that adaptively sense, plan and act to function and
survive in the world. Conversely, other sources
describe honeybee colonies as goal-directed, decision making, systems whos
function is governed by the decentralized control,
and action, of its individual entities. Colonial decision making results
from this design. This paper explores and examines models
of decentralized control for foraging honeybee colonies to reveal its unique
and auspicious features.
To show this relation, a history of the work on honeybee colonies is first
presented. Using this as a basis, the distributed control
model of Seeley is dissected to understand its underlying function,
constraints and variables that correlate to the colonial system.
What can then be shown, is that the model Seeley proposes arises from an
individual bees inherent interaction with the
environment in which it finds itself - including individuals within the
colony. This theme is commonly used in the design and
development of distributive control models for engineering applications and
we can thus show their correlation to the colonial design."