ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2025
Division of labour during honeybee colony defence: poetic and scientific views.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Establishing standards for genome wide association studies in eusocial insects through a case study in honey bees.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Hangry bees: Pollen dearth impacts honey bee (Apis mellifera) behavior and physiology.PloS one · 2026Article
- Integrated Transcriptomic and Metabolomic Insights into "I See You" (ISY) Defensive Behavior inInsects · 2025Article
- The Pheromone Landscape ofMolecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Division of labour as key driver of social evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Colony defence in bumblebees (Bombus terrestris).PloS one · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Poets, philosophers and politicians have used bees, and often projected an idealized human society into their view of how beehives are organized, from the ancient Greeks to present times. We first review how division of labour in honeybees was perceived by human observers, before presenting our current understanding. We focus specifically on defensive behaviour and show that this model provides an interesting case study for our conceptual understanding of division of labour as a whole. We distinguish three phases of the defensive response: detection of an intruder, recruitment of individuals into collective defence and attack. Individual bees may selectively contribute to one or more of these steps. Guard bees monitor entering conspecifics or attacking mammals, and release an alarm pheromone to recruit stinging soldiers. However, we are still far from understanding why only subsets of bees become guards or soldiers (or even if soldiering can be considered a task
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.