Welcome To The Hive!
A fleeting glance at the busy lives of bees
All of us have encountered honey bees at some point, and some may even have suffered the misfortune of being stung by one. But, putting our swollen woes aside, let’s delve into the lives of these incredible animals and try to figure out what makes them one of the world’s most successful “superorganisms.”
Aside from being the source of honey, royal jelly, and a variety of other products that we consume, bees pollinate approximately one-third of the world’s crop population.
Take a moment to process this statement.
So, it is no hyperbole to say that honey bees are of utmost importance to humans. Bees are present in every continent except Antarctica. They live synergetically as tight-knit communities in hexagonal structures well known to us as hives. A hive comprises thousands of bees, and each bee performs a specific job essential for the functioning of the hive.
But how do these bees with a pea-sized brain know what to do?
Well, the answer is written into the genetic makeup of each bee.
Bees are mainly categorized as follows:
The Queen
There is one Queen per hive. The main job of the Queen is to mate and lay eggs — tens and thousands of them! In order to aid this egg-laying process, they have a relatively large abdomen. Almost all of the bees in the hive are the children of the Queen.
A queen bee can lay up to 2000 eggs per day, and they have the unique ability to determine the sex of the offspring.
Suppose the Queen wants to give birth to a female; she will fertilize the egg by releasing sperm stored in the spermatheca, a small sac that sits behind her ovaries (refer to Fig 2).
In the case of a male egg, no sperm is released.
Although a queen bee is different from the average worker bee, she does maintain all the flying and navigational ability of a worker bee because virgin queen bees need to fly outside the hive to mate. This is done to avoid mating with drones (male bees) of the same hive to circumvent inbreeding.
During the first week of her life, the Queen bee mates with around 20 drones and fills the spermatheca with sperm.
She then returns to the hive and serves her sole purpose of growing the hive by laying eggs day after day. This ritual is carried forth season after season. During this time, she is constantly nurtured, cleaned, and fed by the workers in the hive.
Her diet comprises solely of royal jelly (produced by worker bees from a gland in their heads called hypopharynx). This yellowish milky substance is made of digested pollen and either honey or nectar and is very high in nutrients.
A Queen lives up to 5 years, living much longer than her relatives (a very British queen, isn’t she). Given their long life and unique position, there’s rarely a need for a new queen, but when one dies or leaves the hive along with a swarm, the remaining colony must find a replacement.
Royal jelly plays a vital role again. The worker bees choose a few of the larvae and feed them royal jelly while every other larva is switched to a less nutrient-intensive diet of honey pollen and water. As the future Queen feasts on the royal jelly, it triggers different development phases that worker bees don’t experience, like the formation of ovaries for laying eggs. The first emerging Queen searches for and destroys any other Queen still developing in their wax cells. If multiple Queens emerge simultaneously, then they will fight to the death until only one Queen remains. The criteria of selection of a larva to become a Queen is not known to scientists yet.
Drone Bees
All drone bees are male and are characterized by large eyes and the absence of a stinger.
Their sole purpose is to spread the genes of the colony.
They leave the hive every day in search of Queens to mate, ergo the large eyes. Drones in a hive do not usually mate with a virgin queen of the same hive. When they are not trying to mate, they eat leisurely from the honey reserves and wait for a queen to go on her nuptial flight. They are even fed at times by the worker bees.
So all they do is eat, sleep and mate!
But unfortunately, there is no repeat.
Drone bees can only mate 7 to 10 times during a mating flight, and after mating, a drone dies quickly, as his abdomen rips open when his endophallus (mating organ) is removed.
Even drones that survive the mating flight are ejected from their nests, as they have served their sole purpose by mating. So, these drones have a brief yet significant existence.
Worker Bees
All worker bees are female — they do literally everything else apart from mating!
They care for the larvae, tend to the Queen, clean the cells, serve as guards, store honey & forage [bees communicate the location of food via a process known as the “Waggle Dance” which deserves its own article], but the most critical work is the one they do inadvertently; the miracle of pollination.
They have developed fuzzy hair and pollen sacs to carry out a process that doesn’t even affect them directly! It goes without saying that, unlike humans, they evolved to care for their environment.
But the question here is, how do these bees know what tasks to perform?
They have a queen, but she isn’t like a boss; her only purpose is populating the colony. The answer here lies in their hormones.
Each bee knows what to do because their hormones activate the part of their genetic makeup that tells them what jobs they have to tackle and precisely when to tackle them.
In phase one, as the bees emerge from metamorphosis about three weeks after they are born, they begin work immediately by cleaning the cells they came out from.
A couple of days later, their hormones shift them into nurse bee mode to take care and feed the young brood succeeding them. This phase lasts for about a week.
Then, phase three kicks in. Now, the workers move away from the centre of the hive and act as a general handy person, building honeycombs using beeswax secreted by glands in their abdomen, storing food, and guarding the nest. This phase lasts for about a week.
Then comes the final phase, which is considered the most dangerous phase. In this phase, worker bees carry out the activity of foraging, where they leave the nest in search of food/pollen to bring it home for the colony to eat. Foraging leaves them vulnerable to many predators and the weather, costing the lives of many worker bees. This phase lasts for a week or two, after which the worker bees will leave the hive as death approaches. Others carry out corpses of those that die inside.
Conclusion
Worker bees live a thankless life. They are entirely devoted to their hive, even losing their lives during the act of stinging to protect their colony. But this utmost hard work and cooperation have made their species one of the most successful super organisms in nature.
Finally, I’d want to inquire as to why you believe honeycombs are only constructed in hexagonal shapes. The reason lies in mathematics! I shall now leave you to ponder on it.
References:
https://www.orkin.com/stinging-pests/bees/mechanics-of-honey-bee-mating
https://news.stanford.edu/pr/96/960318insects.html
https://askabiologist.asu.edu/bee-colony-life#
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee
https://reasonsandeffects.blogspot.com/2019/08/interesting-facts-about-bees.html
How the bees communicate the location of a potential food source is fascinating and can be well understood through the following video by BBC: https://youtu.be/12Q8FfyLLso
Thank you!
