Honeybees Have Personalities (Sort Of)

Honeybees may seem like nature's perfect little automatons: organized, efficient, self-sacrificing. But in reality the insects are imperfect individuals. Their dance language is sloppy and imprecise. They lose self-control when they're hungry. And, a new study has found, worker bees have distinct personalities. Iowa State University ecologists Alexander Walton and Amy Toth explain that animals need to meet three requirements before you can say they have "personalities." First, individuals have to behave differently from each other in a way that's consistent over time. Second, those behavioral differences also have to show up across different contexts. Finally, there should be sets of behaviors that tend to clump together, like personality types. To look for these features in honeybees, the authors put groups of worker bees into cages. This was an artificial setting, but it let the scientists closely track the behavior of each individual bee (they marked the insects with dabs ...