Hi all
The question of "Which bees go with the swarm?" or for that matter, "Which bees do what?" is a bit of a mirage. Even if you marked bees in several swarms and tracked them their whole lives, this would not give you a clue as to what an individual colony would do under a particular set of circumstances. That they are not machines has been known for long and nothing that has been discovered recently has done anything but confirm that each colony is unique. 

¶

All is done by the mind or spirit of the hive, that mysterious influence which no naturalist has quite fathomed. The mind in the hive is the collective mind of the whole colony, apart from the queen and drones—an hereditary, communal intellect evolved through the ages, the sum and total of all bee experience since the world of bees began.

Despite their reverence for law, no maxim is more certain than that bees do nothing invariably. Their Originality in comb-building is noticed. 

Mr. Kay Robinson thinks that each individual is really working independently, obeying the imperative instinct with which it is endowed by nature; and the fact that its work dovetails in so well with the work of the other members of the community is due to the evolution of the species as a gregarious insect.

Royds, TF (1918) The beasts, birds, and bees of Virgil: a naturalist's handbook to the Georgics

¶

see also:

Walton, A., & Toth, A. L. (2016). Variation in individual worker honey bee behavior shows hallmarks of personality. Behavioral ecology and sociobiology, 70(7), 999-1010.

Alexander Walton, Adam G. Dolezal, Marit A. Bakken and Amy L. Toth. (2018) Individuality in the hive: Behavioral variation and its proximate causes in insect societies, 1001, 47.

Peter L Borst

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