Some honeybees are known to be thrill-seeking adventurers — the David Blaines of their hive, so to speak. Known as scouts, they fearlessly leave their hives and search for new sources of food and new hive locations for the rest of the colony.

Now, a new study suggests that these scouts have genetic brain patterns that set them apart from other bees.

“We found massive differences in brain gene expressions between scouts and nonscouts,” said Gene E. Robinson, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an author of the study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science.