The leader of the group got to her position of power by violently murdering her sisters. She was born in a cell and fed nothing but jelly by thousands of identical nurses. The bodies of her dead children are picked up and tossed outside the institution they were born in. When she is too old to work her once-loyal charges will assassinate her. When a couple have sex the male’s penis is torn in half and left inside the abdomen of his lover. Workers spend their short lives finding miniscule amounts of food in thousands of tiny pieces for the group. They regurgitate the food into each other’s mouths in a vomit chain. These creatures are not characters in a horror film, but animals we and many other animals depend on to survive. They suffer so that we can live.
The animals are, of course, bees. Tiny, weird, violent, strange, social, and powerful bees. Almost all of the crops we grow require insects for pollination. Bees contribute to thousands of ecosystems around the world, as pollinators and as a food source for birds and other insects.
Even as a small child, I had a special fondness for bees. Some of my earliest memories of them include my dismayed mothers’ attempts to stop me from petting particularly fluffy bumble bees, and eating intact honeycomb out of a wooden box with a spoon; the rich dark honey oozing out of the waxy cells like liquid candy.
Inside the hive, the most common species of bee in New Zealand, apis mellifera, or the Western Honey Bee, live fascinating and sometimes horrific lives. So let’s take a look at what it would be like to live in a beehive, from the kind-of cute, to the pretty cool, to the downright disgusting.
Worker bees live for only 63 days long, and the first 21 of them are spent eating and sleeping. The queen bee lays her eggs in wax cells and chooses whether or not to fertilise the egg. Fertilised eggs become female workers, while un-fertilised eggs develop into drones. After hatching, they are fed royal jelly for a number of days during their larval cycle. Eventually they are sealed into a cell. During this time, they will enter a pupal stage, and develop into their more recognizable, insectoid form, before eventually breaking out as fully-developed bees.
For the following 21 days, the naive adults will be assigned a job to do inside the hive. Nurse bees take care of the larvae and the queen. Queen bees have a special retinue of nurses that follow her around, constantly grooming her. Nurses secrete royal jelly from a gland in their mouthparts, which is fed directly to either the larvae or to the adult queens.
General maintenance bees keep the hive tidy and dispose of the bodies of dead bees and failed larvae by tossing them outside. Other bees secrete beeswax from glands in their abdomens, and use it to build and seal cells. After a beekeeper goes into a hive, bees spend an entire day sealing all of the gaps with propolis, a sealant made from tree sap and resins, while the hive is getting set back up. Our desire for honey steals a significant fraction of 63 days a bee is alive for.
Honey is made by bees who spend all day fanning their wings to humidity levels and prevent the honey from fermenting when sealed for storage. This also controls the temperature of the hive. When it gets hot they line up, with their little butts pointing away from the hive, and beat their wings to create air currents that cool the hive and reduce humidity.
Guard bees are the hive’s tiny security guards. They will position themselves around entrances to the hive, analysing the pheromones of all the bees that attempt to enter, rather like checking their ID. If the guards recognise them as a part of the hive, they will be let in, and if not, they will be beaten up and removed from the colony. Bees will only sting each other as a last resort. Usually, they will bite and dismember each other. They have very powerful little mandibles, and are able to rip each other’s limbs off.
Young bees start out doing the simplest jobs before moving on to something more complex. For the last third of their lives, bees will leave the safety of their hives to forage for nectar to make honey, and pollen. The pollen is used as a protein source for nurses; combined with honey, some tasty glandular secretions, and fermented to make “bee bread.” The nectar, a sweet substance produced by flowers specifically to attract insects, is sucked up the bees’ tubular tongues and stored in the crop (an extra stomach). While in the crop, the nectar will mix with enzymes that alter its chemical composition, making it suitable for long-term storage. When the foragers return to the hive, they will regurgitate it into the mouths of runner bees, who will transport it to other runner bees, until eventually, it reaches the honey production line. A whole lot of puking in each other’s mouths is involved in making honey.
Pollen is carried on the hairy nodes of a bee’s back legs. Bees hop flower to flower, with little yellow balls of pollen on their legs to be transported back to the hive. More pollen will get caught on the bee’s fur in a coat of fine yellow dust. When that bee enters another flower, the pollen rubs off and fertilizes it. Bees will keep foraging until they work themselves to death, or more commonly, when killed by a strong wind, a hungry spider, or annihilation by another natural force.
Workers guard the queen out of necessity, not love. A queen bee will lay eggs constantly for the first two years of her life. When her egg production starts to drop off, when she gets too old, weak, or sick to continue, a new queen must be created. Several new queens are reared for the job. Queens begin their lives as regular female larvae. Baby queens are fed copious amounts of royal jelly by the nurses, which they will eat for their entire lives, instead of being weaned onto pollen and honey. Once grown, the fully developed virgin queens will burst free from their cell, and travel throughout the hive, emitting a loud vibratory sound known as piping. This mysterious behaviour could be either to attract worker bees or to challenge the other virgin queens to fight. When one new queen finds another, they fight to the death. Queen bees’ stingers lack the characteristic barbs of worker bees, meaning they are capable of stinging over and over again. A virgin queen will kill all of her rivals, even those still developing in their cells. Once a replacement queen becomes is chosen, the guard bees will turn on their old matriarch. They do this by forming a tight ball around her and sting her to death.
Once one of the contenders for queen has eliminated its rivals in this buggy version of the Hunger Games, she needs to be fertilised in order to start producing worker bee eggs. She flies out of her hive in what is known as a mating flight. Her pheromones will attract swarms of drones from nearby colonies, and they will chase after her, attempting to mate. The drones have thick, stocky bodies, but despite this, are fast and powerful in flight. Their eyes are almost twice the size of a worker or queen’s eyes, in order to see her in the air. When a successful drone catches up to her, he will approach her from above, latching onto her with all six legs.
The mating process only lasts for a couple of seconds, and male ejaculation is incredibly forceful: powerful enough to create and audible popping sound. The stinger-less drone will then die, having left half of his penis and abdominal tissue inside of the queen. She will go on to mate several more times, collecting enough sperm to last her the rest of her career as queen, before returning to her hive.
Towards the end of the fertile seasons, the queen will lay eggs at ever-decreasing rates. The colony will get smaller and smaller, and pack themselves together to form a cluster in either the middle of their hive, or the top box. The queen will be positioned in the centre, and the colder it is, the tighter the worker bees will snuggle in around her. The workers will rotate, so that nobody has to stay on the outside for too long and risk freezing to death. Over this period, they will un-cap and eat the honey they’d spent the rest of year preparing. Even with such a small number of bees left in the colony, depending on how long and harsh the winter months are, they will consume between fifteen and fifty kilos of the stuff. The energy the honey provides will not only allow them to produce sufficient body heat to not only keep the queen warm, but to incubate the eggs in her abdomen, thus ensuring the future of their hive.
That’s about where the cuteness ends. Sometimes a larger colony will attack a smaller one in an all-out war, wiping them out in order to steal their honey and bring it back to the hive. There is also Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a mysterious ailment in which an entire hive of worker bees abandon their home and their queen, leaving behind all eggs and larvae, and perhaps a few nurses, for unknown reasons. CCD is believed to be associated with infestations of the varroa mite, a parasite that sucks the fluid from larvae, giving rise to diseases such as deformed wing virus.
Varroa research is one of the many things the University of Otago Zoology Department beehives are used for, along with behavioural work, and a lot of pheromone work in the past, according to beekeeper and Animal Technician Kim Garrett, consultant for this feature. “I’ve kept bees of my own for 35 years. The biology of them – they’re just amazing creatures, the strategies that they come up with to help with different situations.” When asked if there have ever been any mishaps or misadventures whilst maintaining the university’s five current hives, Garrett states that during the swarming season, swarms of bees which are usually kept on the roof of the Benham building, decide to move on.
“They often don’t go very far in the first 24 hours. There’s been a couple of times when they’d be in one of the shrubs down in the car park out of the front building here, so I go down and scoop them up. When they’re in swarm mode, there are a couple of thousand bees in a ball. You can pick them up in your hands and put them in a box. I get situations where the swarm is kind of loose, and I’ll just be sweeping them up and putting them in a box, and you’ll have a thousand bees land on your back. You can feel the weight of them, one tiny guy multiplied by a thousand, and the heat they generate.”
Western Honey Bees are incredible creatures. Their grisly existence means we can survive. If you want to witness the puking, infanticide, matricide, genocide, slavery, and mutilation that make the world go round, you can get involved with bees at the University. Although the Zoology department doesn’t take on voluntary beekeepers, Garrett suggests that if you want to get involved with the university beehives, to work with the bees, or do some laboratory research, visit Professor Alison Mercer. Dunedin also has its very own beekeeping club, which will be happy to provide information to all interested in these incredible little animals, who do so much for us.