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SUMMARYWhile monitoring the foraging behavior of a cohort of individually marked workers we noticed that one bee, Yellow 57 (Y57), took significantly more flights whose duration were significantly shorter and more constant than those taken by other members of the cohort. Y57's unique flight activity suggested that she was either consistently foraging for food at a source close to her hive or collecting water. Inspection of a creek approximatively 0.5 km from Y57's colony fortuitously resulted in spotting Y57 collecting water. Simultaneous monitoring of the colony entrance and the creek site indicated that Y57 collected water throughout the day and most likely specialized on water collection throughout her 14 day foraging career. These observations confirm that some honey bees do specialize exclusively on water collection.Division of labor in the honey bee colony is age-dependent, with adult workers generally performing discrete sets of tasks as they pass through four temporal castes (S EELEY , 1982). Within an age caste some workers perform certain jobs, such as guarding (L INDAU E R , 1952), removing corpses (V I SS C IIE R , 1983) or water collecting (L l rrnauER, 1952), more frequently than others do, suggesting that they may be specializing to some degree on a single task. However, the extent to which individuals specialize on these tasks exclusively is not known. For example, most foraging workers who collect water do so for only one to two days, but a few workers may be seen engaged in this activity for up to 33 days (L INDAUER , 1952). L INDAUER suggested that these bees only collected water, but it was not known whether they were also foraging for nectar and/or pollen during the same period. Our extensive observations on the activities of one worker confirm that extreme specialization for water collection does occur.Yellow 57 (Y57) was a member of a cohort of 150 individually marked workers whose foraging behavior was observed in the course of another study (RO BINSON , submitted (H EINRIC II, 1979). Additional studies on the occurrence of highly specialized individuals in all castes are needed to determine whether such individual variation is incidental or a regular feature of the colony's division of labor.

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