Dancers and followers in a honeybee colony differently prioritize individual and colony nutritional needs

• Explore–exploit trade-off in honeybees is dictated by individual and colony nutrition.
• Relative proportions of dancers and followers are not affected by colony nutrition.
• Dancers are more sensitive to the colony's nutritional state than are followers.

The evolution of sociality is often accompanied by nutritional conflicts and the evolution of mechanisms to resolve them. The foraging behaviour of eusocial animals such as the honeybee, Apis mellifera, is generally considered to be largely regulated by the colony nutritional state. Previous work based on the information primacy hypothesis has however found that honeybee foragers explore (sample resources) and exploit (consume resources) in accordance with their individual nutritional state. We therefore hypothesized that individual and colony nutritional states differ in their influence on individuals of different behavioural phenotypes such as dancers and followers, who are akin to producers and scroungers, respectively. This leads to the prediction that these two behavioural groups will differ with respect to their exploration–exploitation trade-off and in terms of how they prioritize individual and colony nutritional states. We tested our predictions by creating a mismatch between individual and colony nutritional states. Our results show that dancers and followers do not differ in their levels of exploration and exploitation, but dancers are more responsive to colony nutritional state than are followers with regard to managing their exploration–exploitation trade-off. We discuss these results in the context of how these two behavioural phenotypes may differ in their sensitivity to the different nutritional pathways regulating worker behaviour in a eusocial colony and the evolution of sociality in general.