1. Food Sources: In order to select a food source, a forager bee evaluates several properties related with the food source such
as its closeness to the hive, richness of the energy, taste of its nectar, and the ease or difficulty of extracting this energy.
For the simplicity, the quality of a food source can be represented by only one quantity although it depends on various
parameters mentioned above.
2. Employed foragers: An employed forager is employed at a specific food source which she is currently exploiting. She carries
information about this specific source and shares it with other bees waiting in the hive. The information includes the
distance, the direction and the profitability of the food source.
3. Unemployed foragers: A forager bee that looks for a food source to exploit is called unemployed.It can be either a scout
who searches the environment randomly or an onlooker who tries to find a food source by means of the information given
by the employed bee. The mean number of scouts is about 5–10%.