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Colonies of social insects make numerous group decisions with respect to foraging, nest maintenance and reproduction. Queen production, for example, is of extreme importance because fitness of the colony strongly depends on decisions made during this process (Tarpy and Gilley 2004). In honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies, new queens are produced during reproductive swarming, supersedure and emergency queen replacement. In the latter case, only a few larvae from the many available are selected by workers to be reared as gynes (Winston 1987). Nepotism has been hypothesized as the underlying reason for the selection of individual larvae to be reared as queens (Tarpy et al. 2004). However, the mechanism that initiates this group decision is uncertain (Tarpy and Gilley 2004). In this study, aimed primarily at quantifying the factors that determine which individual larvae are chosen as gynes, we observed …