THE QUEEN BEE AND DARWIN- CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL

THE QUEEN BEE

  

Bees take care of the queen bee more than what they do to themselves. A hive contains thousands , but there can be only one single queen.

Her survival is important for common survival, for only the queen bee can assure the continuity of the colony.

The queen does nothing  but lay eggs.  After she does the first mating, she is always inside the hive, never leaves it, and lays eggs every day from early spring through late summer. The worker bees  feed her and keep her clean.

There aint no difference between the egg that hatches into a queen and an egg that produces the workers. The queen is the result of selective  feeding with royal jelly over her six-day larval period, and emerges not as an ordinary female worker, but as one very different bee by way of  appearance and function.

Workers are fed royal jelly for only three days, but the queen receives it for the full six days of her larval stage and that too three times more.

All worker bees are sterile.  The queen’s head and thorax are little larger than those of the workers.  The queen bee’s hind legs also lack the workers’ hard hairs which fringe the pollen baskets.

Though the queen hatches from exactly the same sort of egg as the workers, she lives for about five years. She is  longer than the male drones.

To take life insurance , the workers raise several queens at a time, not just one. In the event that any harm befalls the old queen, a new queen immediately gets raised. So the first thing our emerging queen bee does is to find and kill the other pupating, potential queens. Leave no survivors is her motto.

If the queen encounters another adult queen in the hive, the two attack each other in a fight to the finish. So when a new queen appears bursts upon the scene ,  the old queen has long since departed it, as it gets a premonition . There can be only one queen bee in the hive is essential for the establishment of discipline.

As she emerges from her cell, she first needs to mate. Mating never takes place inside the hive. The queen leaves the hive and looks for male bees—drones—to do JIGI JIGI and fertilize her.

There are two cases which can cause the queen to leave the hive--: her mating flight and swarming time. Apart from these two occasions, the queen will never ever leave the hive.

The queen flies off from the hive to mate, accompanied by a group of workers. Shortly afterward, she leaves her escort of bees and flies alone to where male drones are present. When she comes within a certain distance of that area she releases a pheromone which allows the drones to locate her.


The queen makes from upto 10 flights during her mating period, mating with a different drone each time. Since the sperm from one male is insufficient to fill her spermatheca, she receives sperm from several males.  Following each fertilization, the sperm from all the males is stored together.

The queen will use this sperm obtained from the mating flights during her life span of 4 to 5 years. Unlike the reproductive cells in many creatures, the male bees’ sperm can be preserved for years in the queen’s body without losing their quantum potency.

Couple of days after  the mating process is over, the queen starts laying eggs one by one, in a series of cells specially prepared by the worker bees. She continues the process, non-stop, each year from early spring to mid-autumn, until she kicks the bucket.

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During the laying period, a queen lays from about 2800 eggs a day  So a single queen may lay a mid boggling 1.4 million eggs within a year.

The queen is able to now the gender of the other bees yet unborn.  When the queen wishes to lay a female egg, she releases a minute amount of sperm from the spermatheca into the duct, to fertilize the egg. The egg will be fertilized only if she releases sperm.  As a result of this process, the female bees emerge from the fertilized eggs and male bees, or drones, from the unfertilized ones.

Practically it is the worker bees who determine the gender of the egg, despite the queen’s supervision of the process.  That is because the queen lays an egg according to the kind of cell the workers have prepared for it.  

If the queen comes across a larger cell, then she lays an unfertilized egg in it.  This means  the queen lays as many drone eggs as the workers have prepared male bee cells for., not any more-- not any less

The workers also determine the number of cells. On the basis of the needs of the hive, they decide how many worker and how many drone cells should be constructed, and how much space should be reserved for honey or pollen .

Bees have very small brains, but has amazingly good  judgment about the need of future social order.

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They lick up the chemical from the queen’s body and transmit it to the other bees during food transfer, which takes place by mouth. During this process, the odor released by the queen is quickly transmitted to all other members of the colony. This means that all of the colony’s members share a common odor, distinguishing them from members of other colonies. There is no need to wear uniform.

The odor of this queenly substance prevents the workers from raising a new queen, so such indications are a signal for the worker bees.  As its level reduces, the workers immediately begin to construct new royal cells and set about raising new queens.

When  the colony finds itself facing the danger of having no queen, the worker bees immediately start feeding some of the existing larvae with royal jelly. The workers start to tear down the walls of cells to widen the regular cells and enlarge them into royal cells. Several worker cells are torn down for any single royal cell. The worker larvae inside them die in this process.

They prefer the survival of a few candidate queens to that of several workers..

Shortly afterwards, the first of the specially reared queens emerges from her cell and sets about eliminating her rivals.

Bees possess a unique consciousness.

The males, or drones make no contribution to the defense of the hive, nor to cleaning, nor to food gathering. Their only function is to do JIGI JIGI with the queen  to fertilize her, and die..

There are very distinctive differences between male and female bees.

-  Only females have stings.

-  Only female bees construct combs.

-  Only females do the ass shakin’ waggle dance .

-  Only females are able to collect nectar.

-  Only females  nurse the young.

In winter, only female bees are to be found in the hive, because the males drones are either kicked out from the hive or if they act too stubborn, they are killed , much before winter’s arrival. As spring approaches, however, the worker bees begin to build cells for male eggs. The queen then lays in these cells eggs which will hatch into drones. The males emerge from these cells in early May.

Despite the male bees’ lack of abilities, the female workers take great care of them until they do JIGI JIGI  with the queen.  Half a dozen  workers need to work non-stop to spoon feed just one of the 400 to 500 male bees in the hive. In other words, some 2,000 to 3,000 worker bees do nothing else than care for the drones for a specific period of time.

No more than 10 males are necessary for the queen to mate.  Yet, a bee community raises hundreds of drones.

The male bees leave the hive and start looking for the queen some two weeks after they emerge from their cells. The males can locate the queen during her mating flight, as she lets out a scent.

The males need to be able to fly at a height for long periods while searching for the queen and to be able to locate her scent from a long distance away.

The queen and the male generally meet at high altitudes. The males are unable to approach the queen at lower than 15 feet . During mating, part of the males’ reproductive organs, including the sperm sac, rupture, and as soon as mating is completed, the male bee dies.

Neither do the other males who fail to mate with the queen have much longer to live. Males live only in spring and early summer, after which they are killed by the workers.

Once the time of the mating flight is over—and as the nectar levels in flowers start to decline in the heat of summer—the female workers’ loving , coy behavior towards the males changes completely. Although the workers look after the males very carefully during the mating period, once the JIGI JIGI  job is done , they start to tear off the drones’ wings and attack them.

If the males try to eat anything, the workers seize them in their powerful mouths and drag them by their antennae or legs to the hive entrance and throw them out.

Expelled in this disgraceful manner,  the males soon die of hunger, since they lack the ability to find nectar.. Therefore, as a last resort, they make determined efforts to re-enter the hive. Yet again they face the bites and poisoned stings of the workers.

Although the drones are larger than the workers, they sort of acquiesce to this female attack. They dont fight back.

Following the expulsion of all the males from the hive, the females—both workers and the queen—spend a long peaceful  time in the hive, until spring the following year, on their own.

Suck on this post Darwin—

You said survival of the fittest and ability to withstand change and all that, right? 

Ever heard of conscious sacrifice to sustain a pre-determined social order? 

Ever heard of waggle dance of the bees?   

I forgot-  you never even heard of DNA!

India must reduce the radiation limit of all the 3G towers from 10W/ Sq m to 5--  cut down by half--or we go the Singapore way, no bees -- all plastic !

CAPT AJIT VADAKAYIL
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