Social Bees

Some time ago I made a new friend at Halibut Point through a mutual fascination with the bees that roam there. He invited me to see the hive he manages at home. Even though Greg lives a couple of miles away it's perfectly possible that some of the honeybees foraging among the wildflowers at the Park were flying in from his location. We were entering the midsummer peak of pollen and nectar harvesting when meadows in particular were abloom. For the bees it was a critical time for provisioning their colony to survive the winter. The myriad foraging chores, and the maintenance of the hive, are performed by the female worker bees that vastly outnumber the males.

Greg plucking a drone from the doorway of the hive

A drone, or male bee

One of the remarkable features of honeybee society is its regulation of gender in coordination with the annual cycle of the colony. Males lack stingers and, apparently, any significant role other than fertilizing egg-laying queens. But to avoid the dangers of inbreeding they must only mate with queens from diverse genetic lines. This is accomplished at high altitude in faraway drone congregation areas where males from many hives await the arrival of queens who will partner with about 15 different drones to store a year's supply of sperm in her body for gradual use in conception even into the following spring. These congregation areas serve as regional sex central locations year after year although neither the newborn drones nor queens have been there before. How they find them is just one of the grand mysteries in the study of bees. The drones do have large eyes and vision superior to the worker bees.

Since they don't contribute to brooding chores or food storage drones are not born until the reproduction season and are evicted from the hive before winter. Not so the worker (female) majority that consolidate into a dense cluster during cold weather with the queen at their center and regulate the colony's temperature by isometric contraction of their flight muscles.

A foraging bee at shadtree flowers in early May,
its pollen baskets brimming and nectar internalized

Over the winter the colony consumes food stored in honeycombs to stay warm. Protein-rich pollen has been stockpiled for the maturation of a new generation of larvae that begin to hatch while the weather is still freezing outside. The great gamble is to maximize a worker population as early in the season as possible to replenish the hive so it can divide and replicate itself by launching a daughter colony with time for both to build sufficient brood and honey for successful over-wintering.

A forager with bulging abdomen (right)
passing nectar to a food-storer bee (left)
Photo from Tom Seeley, The Lives of Bees 2019

The photograph above portrays several of the honeybees' inborn capabilities. Within the darkness of the hive they construct a marvel of wax geometry for food storage and egg development. Here a stay-at-home housekeeper receives incoming nectar by inserting her tongue between the mouthparts of a forager who will regurgitate drops of the syrupy harvest.

 Among the fascinating subjects available to a modern reader is revelations about how honeybee foragers are able to direct their sisters to optimal nectar sources by conveying direction and distance through "tail waggle dances." The richness of the source seems to be described by the relative enthusiasm of the performance. And so a hive economizes on its collective efficiency in food gathering.

 It would be easy to think that the queen bee is somehow at the decision-making center of hive life, assigning specializations, controlling operations, evolving calendar responses. However the ingenious research of apiologists such as Tom Seeley (The Lives of Bees, 2019) has revealed that "a colony's queen in not the Royal Decider. Rather, she is the Royal Ovipositor. Each day she monotonously lays the 1,500 or so eggs needed to maintain her colony's workforce. She is oblivious of her colony's ever-changing labor needs...to which the colony's staff of worker bees steadily adapts itself." 

Bumblebee

Bumblebees are the other apian species to have evolved a complex social organization though less elaborately than honeybees. Most bumblebees do not live through the winter. The colonies perpetuate through fertilized hibernating queens that burrow underground, lower their metabolic rate, stop breathing and go into a torpor. We'll look at other distinctions between these types in a future posting.