Bees Make the Best Pets. Jack Mingo
does, and she does it nearly constantly during honey season—from 1,000 to 1,500 eggs a day. She's not really the leader of the hive; more like its ovaries. Still, she's very important to the continuing existence of the hive so she is well protected, pretty much to the point of house arrest. When she's doing well, she communicates it through cues of scent and behavior; if she's not doing well, that news gets quickly disseminated through the hive as well. The workers show who's really boss at that time: They immediately begin planning to depose her, creating special, extra large queen cells that look like peanuts sticking out from the other cells. They grab a healthy-looking larva for each and drench it in an extra dollop of royal jelly that makes it grow faster, bigger, and with fully developed sex organs. The first queen that emerges kills off her rivals, and goes on a mating flight to meet some cute drones and make sweet but fatal love to them. She comes back with enough sperm to last a lifetime of egg-laying.
Now this part is kind of cool: The sperm stays in a special repository from which she can at will decide whether to fertilize an egg or not. Why the choice? Weirdly, it's for gender selection. If she chooses to fertilize an egg, it hatches a female worker bee. If she chooses to not fertilize an egg, it hatches a drone.
The queen lays eggs.
She's the only one
that does, and she
does it nearly
constantly during
honey season.
BLUE BLOODS
Drones: Drones are the few males in a hive, and they play up the role like the pampered gigolos they are, hanging around, doing no work, living off the work of their sisters. Each hive in an area provides drones that head to a designated drone area, waiting for any virgin queen to fly by looking for a good time. The variety of drones hanging around somewhat minimizes the chance of in-breeding with their queenly sisters, but these things happen even in the best of hives. Still, there are some interesting varieties of sexual experience among bees that you won't read about in the Kama Sutra. Mating in midair, for example, swooping and diving toward the ground. Unfortunately, the drones' pleasure is even more short-lived than most males. As they withdraw, they discover that their penises are still inextricably stuck inside the queen. When they tear away from their lover, they really tear away from her, crumpling to the ground in a painful death. Any drones that manage to survive into the fall are given the boot to die in the cold as winter approaches. Cruel, but understandable.
Bee Team #2: Hive Got a Job for You
Not every bee can hang around laying eggs or anticipating sex. In fact, worker bees normally don't have the opportunity to do either one. The workers, all female, live a life of celibacy and constant work, literally from the moment they're born until the moment they're thrown out of the hive. It's almost an extreme prototype for the modern corporation.
But it's not as if there are no promotion possibilities in the HiveCo Corporation. Every worker bee goes through a gamut of jobs in its short life:
Custodian: As soon as a worker bee eats her way out of her brood cell, she has a job: cleaning out the cell she just came out of, making it ready for the next egg.
Nursemaid: Next job is taking care of the grubby little babies, the larvae: feeding them, keeping them the right temperature, dosing them with royal jelly, and sealing them up into their cells with a mix of wax and pollen.
Warehouse worker: Receiving, moving around, and storing the honey and pollen is a full-time job.
Heating, cooling, and ventilation: Bees flapping their wings as they work creates a constant stream of fresh air circulating through the hives. On hot days, lines of bees wind throughout the hive, all facing the same direction, holding tight and buzzing their wings as if flying, creating a small wind that blows in through the entrance, around the hive, and out again. Some bees hold small drops of water to cool the air further. On cold days, bees crowd close in the nursery, flexing their wing muscles to generate heat, keeping themselves, the queen, and the babies warm.
TACTICAL PROCEDURE, BEE VS. PREDATOR
DEFCON 4: Wary monitoring from hive.
DEFCON 3: Menacing buzzes around intruder's head.
DEFCON 2: Repeated head-butting impacts against intruder's face and head.
DEFCON 1: Commencement of stinging.
Guards: Standing just inside the entrances of a hive, the guards act like bouncers in a club, keeping out unauthorized bugs. When threatened by something bigger, they fearlessly fly forth to defend the hive from birds and animals of all kinds, including people, bears, elephants, and pretty much anything else that gets too close.
Builders: By the twelfth day of its life, a bee's wax glands begin working, dropping little fish-scale-looking flakes of wax all over the hive, like oversized dandruff. The builders collect the flakes, crawl into unfinished honeycomb cells and shape the wax into cell walls.
Field bees: In what will likely be its last job, the fully mature bee begins going out into the world to collect needed supplies. Most notably nectar and pollen from flowers, of course, but also water for cooling and sticky sap from plants and trees. The latter is the major ingredient of propolis, a sticky filler material bees use to seal up unwanted gaps and holes.
AGING BEES LOSE THEIR HAIR TOO
Here's how to tell a honey bee's age:
1 Where did you find it? If outside the hive, it's at least nine days old. If it's in the hive but outside the ring of pollen, it's at least four or five days old. If it's inside the circle, it's probably a nursemaid, which is usually only a few days old, unless it's the big one, the laying queen. She can be anywhere from a few weeks to several years old.
2 If the bee is extremely fuzzy, it's young. If its hair is thin enough that its black body is showing through the down, it's old—probably a month or more. In bee years, during the hard-working summertime, a month is the equivalent of about fifty to sixty human years.
There Are Always Exceptions
Remember that I said worker bees don't “normally” lay eggs? That's because the queen's pheromones suppress the reproductive systems of the workers. However, if the queen dies and there are no larvae that can be groomed to replace her, that can change. Unless a beekeeper intervenes with a new queen, the hive is doomed. In that case, a terminally queenless colony will try to spread its genes before it dwindles away, using an unexpected tactic: some of the workers will start laying eggs. However, since they haven't mated, their unfertilized eggs will yield only drones (as mentioned above). Maybe some of them will get lucky and find a willing queen, passing the hive's genes along in its dying days.
When older bees begin collecting nectar and pollen from outside the hive, their brains change, and not really for the better. For example, after they memorize the surroundings of the hive, they lose the ability to learn new things. Normally, they stay that way until they die. However, sometimes “normal” gets disrupted; for example, if a hive has to grow a new queen, there can be a month-long gap before any new bees hatch. Normally, that would mean the larvae from the new queen wouldn't have young nursery