Driving home yesterday we saw about fifty boxes in a field. The boys asked what they were and I told them they were bees, they were being raised by the property owner. We started talking about bees and they asked a few questions that i didn’t have a clue how to answer. Instead of making up an answer like I usually do I told them I would ask the SD. So, here it goes:
1: There is a Queen bee, but is there a King bee? If not who mates with the Queen? (do bees even mate? If they do does it involve dinner and Barry White Music?)
2: Is there a Queen be in each of those boxes?
3: Where does the queen come from? Is she born a Queen or does she become one? Can any bee have a child that becomes Queen or does only a Queen have a child that becomes a Queen?
If you have any more interesting be facts that would be interesting, feel free to pass them on. Thanks!
Male bees are called drones. The only function of a drone is to mate with a queen. When a new queen takes her first (and only) flight, she mates with up to 10 or more males on that flight (the only time she’ll mate), lands and starts a new colony.
If by box you mean hive, yes, there is a queen in each one.
Any female bee can become a queen. If the hive need a queen, the workers will feed some of the developing larvae “royal jelly” - this has a particular mix of hormones that will turn the bee from a regular worker into a queen.
The Queen actually emits hormones which prevent other female larvae from developing into queens. Becoming a Queen does require the larvae to be fed royal jelly, but the process is triggered by a lack of the suppression hormones created by the Queen. That way if the Queen dies or leaves the hive, a new Queen will be automatically created from one of the female larvae on hand.
Nearly all the bees in the hive are female. Males are only created for the purpose of mating with new Queens on their mating flights, and die immediately after mating.
Well, those bees might not actually be being raised by the property owner. Farmers who need seasonal pollination for their crops often employ owners of these bee hives who bring them in for the brief pollination period of a few weeks and then they transport the hives to another location.
These pollination services travel the country moving the hives between various fruit orchards, berry and nut crops. You occasionally see news articles about a truck transporting bees across the county getting in an accident, such as this one involving 14 million bees.
No Kings, just drones. They are the only males in the hive and don’t contribute much except, for the lucky one, DNA.
One queen in hive/box.
Born a queen. While still in their cells forming they are fed “royal jelly” by the workers. Several are growing at the same time and the first one to hatch kills the others. She then mates in flight with one of the many drones chasing her and starts her egg-laying career. The drones are not let back into the hive and die. If I recall correctly (50/50 chance), she may either return to the hive if the previous queen has died or headed out to start a new hive or she may start a new hive herself.
I read a lot about bees in my long ago youth but have forgotten most of what I learned. They are fascinating and make for a great topic for kids to learn about.
I am not an expert so take the following with a grain of salt:
No Kings, just drones. They are the only males in the hive and don’t contribute much except, for the lucky one, DNA.
One queen in hive/box.
Born a queen. While still in their cells forming they are fed “royal jelly” by the workers. Several are growing at the same time and the first one to hatch kills the others. She then mates in flight with one of the many drones chasing her and starts her egg-laying career. The drones are not let back into the hive and die. If I recall correctly (50/50 chance), she may either return to the hive if the previous queen has died or headed out to start a new hive or she may start a new hive herself.
I read a lot about bees in my long ago youth but have forgotten most of what I learned. They are fascinating and make for a great topic for kids to learn about. Books have be written on their dancing alone. Now I hear that flowers can somehow sense their presence and alter their (plants) electrical field which aids in attracting the bees. Which means the bees can somehow sense that very slight change in said electrical field. Pretty amazing stuff.
A queen is ‘queen’ in name only. In reality she is the egg making slave of the hive.
A ‘hive’ isn’t all the children of a particular queen. In fact, you can mix up a bunch of honeybees from different hives and put them together with a brand new queen and, after a few days, all the bees will recognize each other as part of that new hive. The queen produces a pheromone that ties them all together.
I think of a queen breeding like this: Drones are the wayward teenage boys of the hive. All they do all day is hang around on street corners, looking for sex. They come home at night to raid the pantry, take up space and play little bee video games. Once (maybe twice) in her life a young virgin queen will venture out into the world alone. She will be beset by these drones and sexed up (to use the technical term), over and over again, 10, 15 times maybe. None of them will buy her so much as a drink. Then she returns to the hive and never leaves again unless they swarm. Who would?
In the fall the drones are driven out of the hive to die.
If my memory serve, the drone population can makeup 10% of a hive at times. That is how important it is to get out that genetic material.
Also, at times there can be more than one queen. When new queens are produced by a hive, they make more than one. One kills the others to become the queen.
Honey is basically bee vomit. The workers eat the flower nectar, fly back to the hive, and regurgitate it. Inside the hive they’ll eat/regurgitate it multiple times until it’s basically honey (it also needs to dehydrate a bit).
Sorry, that part is incorrect. A queen can’t start a hive by herself. She needs a lot of existing bees to build the comb, bring in food and tend the larva. A new queen must return to her hive once she mates. She’s got nowhere else to go.
In nature, a new hive is formed when the old queen leaves with a swarm. Then the old hive makes some new queens, they go have bee sex then one new queen kills all her rivals, including destroying any queen cells still in the hive.
In human controlled hives, we can catch these fertile queens and build new hives around them by putting them together with worker bees.
It’s worth poining out that if the queen bee dies it is possible for the worker bees to become queens and start laying eggs. The problem with this though is that the worker bee will not have mated and for honey bees unfertilized eggs will produce only male drone bees making the colony non-viable.
There is one exception to this among the different species and subspecies of honey bees: the cape bee, in which some unfertilized female workers are able to produce female eggs.
I’ve mentioned before that my mother was a bee-keeper. She used to farm out her hives, and I went along as muscle. We used to drive to sites in her small car with a hive or two of the bees in the back. We were fully suited and put a nice big sign on the car. Everyone gave us a very wide berth.
Random more information about beekeeping from my inlaws who keep bees.
Bees can live a couple of years, and queens can live for 3 years, sometimes a bit more. However, most “farmed” beehives will have a new queen every year - the beekeeper will fish out the old one, squish her, and put a “fresh” bought queen in instead. The queens ship through the mail in a little container with a few workers for caretakers, and when you put the container in the hive, the worker bees inside and outside the container spend a day or so getting used to each other while they eat through a big wax plug keeping Queenie inside.
The reason for this is that supposedly Queens lay fewer and fewer eggs as they age, so it can be healthier to keep her young and strong. Also, if you let the hive replace the old Queen themselves, it greatly increases the chances that the hive will swarm, and if you aren’t out there 24/7, you could lose the portion of bees that swarm off, leaving you with a very weak hive remaining.
Swarms can be captured and convinced to be farmed bees pretty easily. They’re really gentle and docile when they’re swarming, because they’re all trying to shelter the Queen with their bodies, so they make this big bee-ball that just hangs out and mostly ignores whatever you do to them. Shake them into an empty hive, block the doors for 2 days until they settle in, and then they’re happy as clams in mud. Most beekeepers will retrieve swarms from their local area to use as “freebies” even if they aren’t willing to remove actual hives that are in unfortunate locations.
Hives can be split into two if they get too big or too rowdy - you take some of the layers off that have eggs in them and move them to another location, and they’ll either use your Queen that you give them, or they’ll make their own.
Hives have really individual temperaments. There are about 24 hives with my in-laws, and they know which ones are feisty, which ones are laid back, which ones are overproducers, and which ones are lazy… it’s strange since they’re all related hives, but that’s how it works out.
Nitpick: The new queen doesn’t necessarily kill all other developing queens, if she hatches in a large colony, she may instead swarm with some of the workers, and go start a new colony. Sometimes a large hive can lose several swarms before the worker density reduces to a level where there aren’t enough bees to both form another swarm and leave enough bees in the hive. Then the remaining queens fight it out (they even fight nasty, and kill the developing queens that haven’t hatched yet), leaving only one winner.
Generally bee keepers try very hard to stop this from happening though, and will squish all but one of the queen cells themselves. Nobody likes losing swarms.
The queen shouldn’t feel too resentful of the drones for not staying in touch by the way- mating rips their reproductive organs out, so they can only mate once, and die shortly afterwards.
Incidently, all bee larvae are fed on royal jelly- it’s how long they’re fed on it that decides if they’ll be a worker or a queen; worker larvae are only fed it for around the first 72 hours. Generally, eggs intended to be queens will be laid in specially made cells, but in case of emergency, any larva (except drone larvae, which are male, obviously) which is still eating royal jelly can be then reared as a queen; but those who are over 3 days, and are being fed ‘brood food’, not royal jelly, are out of luck- they can’t ever be queen, no matter what Disney says.
If you want more ways to confuse boys- how about the fact that male bees don’t have a father? They do have a grandfather though…
