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
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