High levels of cooperation are often cited as the primary reasons for the ecological success of social insects. In social insects, workers perform a multitude of tasks such as foraging, nest construction and brood rearing without central control of how work is allocated among individuals. It has been suggested that workers choose a task by responding to stimuli gathered from the environment. Response threshold models assume that individuals in a colony vary in the stimulus intensity (response threshold) at which they begin to perform the corresponding task. In a recent paper, we investigated the limitations of the models of division of labor that base on the response thresholds. This abstract is meant to convey a brief summary of the points we raised in that study.