Lucky is relative…don’t the boy bees get their junk torn off in the mating process?
Noted entomologist Slim Harpo begs to differ.
Bit of trivia: in response to rising temperatures (which would hurt bees, larvae and even soften the wax comb,) bees move to air passages and beat their wings to move air to cool the hive. This instinct is in all bees and even drones will help. So that’s one bit of work that drones will do. All their work is just instinct anyway – none of it is hard work for the benefit of the hive vs. lounging around the pantry, getting fed, and looking for sex.
My reply relates strictly to honeybees. Not sure about other types, but…
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?)
As the others have said, no king, just drones. Interesting tidbit: All male honeybees are drones. They do not have stingers and, if they do not impregnate the queen, they are eventually kicked out of the hive and usually die not long afterwards. From birth, they are catered to by worker bees (all non-queen adult females) who bring them food, secure the hive, etc. So, when ousted, males have poor survival skills, no weapon (stinger) and it’s pretty much a wrap for them.
2: Is there a Queen be in each of those boxes? Yes. It’s the only way to keep workers producing and returning to the hive.
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?
She is born a queen and will fight other potential queens to the death. Often, it comes down to survival of the fittest among young queens. Like someone else said, though, she’s literally a baby-making slave to the hive. Her only job is to mate and give birth until she dies and a new queen takes her place.
If you have any more interesting be facts that would be interesting, feel free to pass them on. Thanks!
**As previously stated, all worker bees are female. This means that when you see a honeybee, unless it’s an exiled drone (which is harmless), it’s a female.
Female honeybees do what is known as a waggle dance, which is a very serious ordeal since it is how they communicate to other workers when they’ve found food during foraging expeditions. By turning her body in a particular pattern, the honeybee gives exact coordinates using the sun to measure the distance to a food source. Yes, time is of serious essence because of the earth’s changing position in relation to the sun, but experienced workers adjust the coordinates accordingly in order to give the most exact directions to the rest of the group. Genius, right?
A honeybee is not particularly interested in stinging you on sight…unless she believe you to be a threat to the hive (really, the queen) or if you are in between her very meticulously mapped path between food and the queen. Honeybees in flight are generally on a tight schedule and a narrow path, so she figures it best to sting you to get you to move out of her way than for her to risk losing direction or time (occasionally, they also get lost, which I’m sure they interpret as a disastrous event considering the stakes). Hence, when you see a honeybee, she’s either busy foraging or on her way to a known food source. Best advice is to step aside and let the lady do her thing.
Workers literally work themselves to death. They have no concern for self, only for the queen, her offspring and the drones needed to keep the queen pregnant. When they die, it’s literally in the line of duty.
The Africanized honeybee is a very aggressive breed. While the average (European) honeybee is too busy to be concerned about you, the African honeybee is an over-protective variety. More sensitive to sounds, vibrations and, of course, a foreigner’s presence, an Africanized honeybee will swarm at the slightest trigger. This means lawn mower and car engines, loud music, etc.
Africanized honeybees also consider a wider radius around the hive to be their territory to protect and will chase their threat a lot further than a European honeybee will. It’s not that Africanized honeybees have stronger venom than European honeybees or that they sting more often, it is that they attack in such vigorous and large swarms and overwhelm their targets that’s of issue.
All honeybees can only sting once since they lose their abdomens and die after each poke. Every sting is literally a suicide mission that she won’t hesitate to engage in if it protects her colony.
When honeybees need to move the queen, they create a swarm and all move at once. If traveling a distance, they may stop for a day or two at a temporary location, but they’re not there to cause harm, only to rest and refuel before hitting the skies again.
In short, honeybees are awesome creatures!
A natural enemy of the honeybee is wasps since they aggressively hijack honeybee hives, eat their young, kill their queens, etc.**
- Upthread the drone is said to be “weaponless,” without a stinger, as one of a number of reasons it has a short life after the Queen becomes pregnant. I don’t mean to get hung up semantically, but I do understand the need for defense mechanisms in an organism–I think. It is a “defense” mechanism which achieves exactly what it is supposed to be defending against–death–with stinger/disembowelment, and is only organism-defense when the organism is not the bee but the hive.
So the statement about why drones aren’t going to live long after the Queen is mated is a little off, I think.
Also, I know without drones the whole Darwin/species/evolution thing won’t get off the ground, but tell me again: the worker bees are pumped out without drone DNA? Ie, underutilized eggs? Huh?
A little bit of bee trivia…the phrase “sweetness and light”, which most English-speakers have heard more than once in their lives, refers to the products of the beehive: honey and wax. It was coined by Jonathan Swift in his “Battle of the Books”, when Aesop (one of the books) overhears a bee and a spider arguing.
Italics word autouncorrected. Should be “unfertilized.”
This is great. Thanks.
No - all female bees are the product of fertilized eggs, whether workers or queens (remember, it’s nurture that makes a queen). Drones come from unfertilized eggs - they have a mother but no father.
This makes the number of a bees’ ancestors at any generation follow the Fibonacci sequence, by the way. A drone has a mother (1) who herself has a mother and father (2) who in their turn have a mother and father, and a mother (3), and so on up the family tree.
The workers are generally sisters of the queen, or possibly her aunts. By having one sister or niece lay eggs all the time, the other family members can concentrate on food gathering and defense. So the workers’ DNA will get passed on, but by another family member.
Where do the drones come from? Are there always some hanging around? I mean if the queen takes off and larvae are reassigned to become a new queen, who does that mate with?
Do they start making drones at the same time they start on a new queen? Does the queen produce unfertilized eggs as well as fertilized ones?
Thanks for cx–still my amazement stands: we’ve got an egg, which in 99.99 % of other species gets tossed as useless material incapable of producing anything, inbees produces a fantastically capable organism, except for the DNA part.
- This applies to who else? Other other hive-y social insects? Ants?
- Sine qua non of “social insects,” therefore termites and other hive-y (to me) species are by definition excluded?
A few people have implied that drones mate with the queen in the hive, or even that they repeatedly mate with her to keep her fertility up- this is wrong. Remember the drones are a) the sons of the queen in that hive, and b) are produced from unfertilised eggs, so are actually entirely formed from her DNA- mating with your own half-clone is generally a bad idea, and they don’t do it.
They mate on one occasion- though with more than one drone, and the number of drones they mate with appears to affect how many fertile eggs they can produce in their lifetime. They don’t get to go back and have another try if they don’t sucessfully mate, either, once is all they get. Drones congregate on sunny days, often up hills or in clearings, with drones from many hives all hanging around, waiting for virgin queens to show up, then they all compete to mate.
Ants and wasps follow the same model of unfertilised=male, it’s called ‘haplodiploidy’.
Termites I’m not sure of, but termites have a different society model, and do in fact have a ‘king’ as well as a queen. Many other insects can lay unfertile eggs which hatch though, as can some other animals, including some reptiles. Some species have no males.
Careful with those questions, bro. You are THIS CLOSE to reading some E. O. Wilson!
Not to mention B.B. King.
Bees are rather famously held up as an example of the selfish gene theory, because if you do the math, workers are actually more closely related genetically to the other offspring of their queen than they would be to their own hypothetical offspring. So the apparent selflessness of the workers - devoting their lives working to ensure the survival of another’s offspring - is explained by their unusual pattern of genetic inheritance.
Any new virgin queen will be looking for drones from other hives to mate with. Any drones the hive is making will be to mate with queens from other hives.
Once mated, the queen can selectively fertilise any eggs she likes (which will be nearly all of them) from her internally stored sperm, laying drones only when the hive needs them.
It’s possible for a virgin queen to be unsuccessful in mating - she gets several goes spread out over a few days. In that case, the hive is fucked because she can now only lay drones, which she will not mate with, and the hive can’t make any more queens even if it realized it needed to.
I am a little unclear on this. The queen does not mate with drones from here own hive? From the wiki link provided above, it indicates the queen may “choose” to lay an unfertilized egg that results in a drone. I take that, and what you say here to mean she is creating drones for other hives(?). If so, it would seem the drones really serve no real advantage to their home hive at all, correct?
Also, the point above about the boxes containing their own queen. I wondered about that - I was under the impression that bees are fairly defensive against bees from other queen’s hives. With those boxes so close to one another, I would think there would be more territory issues. But then again, each box seems like it would be it’s own separate colony (physically). So how do those boxes work again WRT queens?
Facinating thread, BTW.
Isn’t it?
Until a few years ago, the only interest I had in bees was avoiding them. Now, I just love reading about them and watching them with a new understanding.
I just installed my own bees and took six classes on maintaining a hive. Those are my qualifications, so I may not be entirely right.
Whether or not bees can freely enter each others hives can depend on the situation, but it is not normal operation for them to do so. Different bees behave differently though. With the exception of newly installed hives, the bees are all children of the queen. In fact, one way to change your hives race (bees have races for example Italian, Carneolan, Caucasian, Russian Hybrid, and of course Africanized) is to requeen with that race of queen. When bees from a well developed hive enter a new hive they will often rob that hive of its nectar. For my new hive, I have put in an entrance reducer specifically to keep bees from other hives getting in. For a new hive, the small entrance is fine and it is easier for them to defend.
At this point though, my bees are not related to the queen. The queen and the bees were shipped together, but the queen was kept separate in a queen cage. Inside the queen cage were four attendants that were from her colony. The queen is kept separate because if she were released before the colony accepted her they would kill her. Do the queen cage is supplied with a candy plug that, over the coarse of a few days, they eat through and let her out. The attendants are sacrificed, because they are not part of that colony.
So it is definitely not normal for bees to enter each others colonies. On the other hand, I have heard that in odd situations it can happen without issue.