Honeybee colonies can regulate their collection of pollen in response to pollen stores within the hive. The question as to how colonies or individual foragers detect changes in pollen quantity or quality is intriguing. Dr. Liu Fanglin’s studies on honeybee suggested that honeybee foragers can detect and estimate the amount of phelonics in pollen, pollen-foraging activities of a honeybee colony are regulated by quantitive changes in phenolic contents of pollen. Honeybees could, therefore, use nonnutritional factors, such as pollen phenolics, to assess colony requirements and to change foraging dynamics accordingly.

  The paper titled “Pollen phenolics and regulation of pollen foraging in honeybee colony” has been published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology (2006), 59:582-588.  Full  article is available at the following site:

http://www.springerlink.com/media/6cc6l52umq2yyv4hdr02/contributions/y/6/8/2/y68231u230265150.pdf