I have been reading through Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution and he mentions a curious fact about bees (bolding by me for emphasis):
predatory instincts and laziness continue to exist among the bees as well, and reappear each. time that their growth is favoured by some circumstances. It is well known that there always are a number of bees which prefer a life of robbery to the laborious life of a worker; and that both periods of scarcity and periods of an unusually rich supply of food lead to an increase of the robbing class. When our crops are in and there remains but little to gather in our meadows and fields, robbing bees become of more frequent occurrence; while, on the other side, about the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the sugar refineries of Europe, robbery, laziness, and very often drunkenness become quite usual with the bees. We thus see that anti-social instincts continue to exist amidst the bees as well;
He does not provide a citation for this (and even if he did, it would be something from the late 1800s). Is there a good modern reference for the above behavior?
I would in particular be interested in something like a graph of %-robber-bees vs. plentiness-of-food (in some abstract measure of the latter) so that I could intuitively see the increase in lazy/robber bees as the environment is low on food, or as it is overly abundant and compare it to 'typical levels'.
Theories that explain this behavior are of interest, as well, but I am primarily after experimental measures/observations to support and quantify the above quote.
