RECOGNITION PHEROMONES OF THE HONEY BEE

Social recognition is the tool that allows animals to act appropriately toward other animals; animals survive as individuals because they are able to recognize the salient features of other animals, with whom they interact accordingly. Recognition systems provide the information animals need to make decisions about their behavior: whether to cooperate, to fight, to flee, or to court. Animals use recognition systems to determine the species of another animal, its sex, its age, or its fighting ability. In addition, animals recognize one another as individuals, as offspring, as sibs, as mates, or as members of a dominance hierarchy. Social recognition is an essential piece of the puzzle of understanding behavioral interactions between animals in populations. Many basic issues concerning kin and other types of recognition are not yet resolved; it has generally been easy to test whether recognition is present but much more difficult to discover the underlying mechanisms of recognition (Fletcher and Michener 1987, Hepper 1991, Pfennig and Sherman 1995). In fact, the actual biochemical mechanisms of recognition have never been determined for any species. In this article, I explore the nature and evolution of social recognition in honey bees, Apis

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