Abstract <p>There is significant interindividual variation in behavior and life history traits and how they covary within a species. Differences in activity rates are a fundamental part of such variation and can lead to contrasting performance-based tradeoffs that can be difficult to discern due to the large among-individual variation. This in turn makes it challenging to assess the functional significance of these alternative phenotypes, especially in a social context. In social insect colonies, a small group of highly active individuals called ‘elites’ perform the majority of colony foraging and understanding their outsized influence on the colony phenotype requires discerning if they differ from the rest of the colony members in their performance tradeoffs. Using automated RFID tracking to follow the lifetime foraging performance of individuals and identify elite and non-elite foragers in a honeybee colony based on a quantitative framework, we demonstrate that performance tradeoffs between foraging behavior and life history are different for elites and non-elites. We also show that elites and non-elites differ in temporal foraging patterns and behavioral ontogeny, with non-elites exhibiting higher behavioral plasticity. These results show how elites and non-elites represent distinct behavioral phenotypes and the importance of understanding their underlying genetic and developmental basis.</p> Significance statement <p>Interindividual variation in behavior and life history within a species has significant functional implications, especially in the context of social groups. Such variation can produce interindividual differences in performance tradeoffs that are characteristic of covarying traits. However, these distinct patterns of tradeoffs are often masked due to the high amounts of among-individual variation. This study tests and demonstrates that elites, the small fraction of individuals that perform a majority of the foraging effort in a honeybee colony, display performance tradeoffs that are distinct from the rest of the colony members. These results show that it is important to consider these distinct patterns of covariation between behavior and life history traits among individuals in our understanding regarding how different individuals influence the shape of the colony phenotype.</p>