help worker bees recognize the brood’s gender, stage of development, and feeding needs.
Shall we dance?
Perhaps the most famous and fascinating “language” of the honey bee is communicated through a series of dances done by foraging worker bees who return to the hive with news of nectar, pollen, or water. The worker bees dance on the comb using precise patterns. Depending on the style of dance, a variety of information is shared with the honey bees’ sisters. They’re able to obtain remarkably accurate information about the location and type of food the foraging bees have discovered.
Two common types of dances are the round dance and the waggle dance.
The round dance communicates that the food source is near the hive (within 10–80 yards). Figure 2-4 illustrates dancing movements.
For a food source found at a greater distance from the hive, the worker bee performs the waggle dance. It involves a shivering side-to-side motion of the abdomen while the dancing bee moves in a figure eight pattern. The vigor of the waggle, the number of times it is repeated, the direction of the dance, and the sound the bee makes communicate amazingly precise information about the location of the food source. See Figure 2-4.
The dancing bees pause between performances to offer potential recruits a taste of the goodies they bring back to the hive. Combined with the dancing, the samples provide additional information about where the food can be found and what type of flower it is from.
Courtesy of Howland Blackiston
FIGURE 2-4: The round dance (top) and the waggle dance (bottom).
Getting to Know the Male and the Two Female Castes
During summer months, about 60,000 or more bees reside in a healthy hive. And while you may think that all those insects look exactly alike, the population actually includes two different female castes (the queen and the workers) and the male bees (drones; see Figure 2-5). Each type has its own characteristics, roles, and responsibilities. Upon closer examination, the three look a little different. Being able to distinguish one from the other is important.
Her majesty, the queen
Let there be no mistake about it — the queen bee is the heart and soul of the colony. There is only one queen bee in a colony. She is the reason for nearly everything the rest of the colony does. The queen is the only bee without which the rest of the colony cannot survive. Without her, your hive is sunk. A good-quality queen means a strong and productive hive. For more information on how to evaluate a good queen, see Chapter 8. And for some real fun, try raising your own queens from your best performing hives. See Chapter 14.
Courtesy of Howland Blackiston
FIGURE 2-5: These are the three types of bees in the hive: worker, drone, and queen.
The queen is the largest bee in the colony, with a long and graceful body. She is the only female with fully developed ovaries. The queen’s two primary purposes are to produce chemical scents that help regulate the unity of the colony and to lay eggs — and lots of them. She is, in fact, an egg-laying machine, capable of producing more than 1,500 eggs a day at 30-second intervals. That many eggs are more than her body weight!
The other bees pay close attention to the queen, tending to her every need. Like a regal celebrity, she’s always surrounded by a flock of attendants as she moves about the hive (see Figure 2-6). Yet, she isn’t spoiled. These attendants are vital because the queen is incapable of tending to her own basic needs. She can neither feed nor groom herself. She can’t even leave the hive to relieve herself. And so her doting attendants (the queen’s court, her retinue) take care of her basic needs while she tirelessly goes from cell to cell doing what she does best: lay eggs.
Courtesy of USDA-ARS
FIGURE 2-6: A queen and her attentive attendants.
The gentle queen bee has a stinger, but it is rare for a beekeeper to be stung by a queen bee. I have handled many queen bees and have never been stung by any of them. In general, queen bees use their stingers only to kill rival queens that may emerge or be introduced in the hive.
The queen can live for two or more years, but replacing your queen after a season or two ensures maximum productivity and colony health. Many seasoned beekeepers routinely replace their queens every year after the nectar flow. This practice ensures that the colony has a new, energetic, and fertile young queen each season. You may wonder why you should replace the queen if she’s still alive. That’s an easy one: As a queen ages, her egg-laying capability slows down, which results in less and less brood each season. Less brood means a smaller colony. And a smaller colony means a lackluster honey harvest for you! For information on how to successfully introduce a new queen, see Chapter 10. For information on how to raise your own queens (now, that’s fun!), see Chapter 14.
AMAZING “QUEEN SUBSTANCES”
In addition to laying eggs, the queen plays a vital role in maintaining the colony’s cohesiveness and stability. The mere presence of the queen in the hive motivates the productivity of the colony. Her importance to the hive is evident in the amount of attention paid to her by the worker bees everywhere she goes in the hive. But, as is true of every working mom or regal presence, she can’t be everywhere at once, and she doesn’t interact with every member of the colony every day. So how does the colony know it has a queen? By her scent. The queen produces a number of different pheromones (mentioned earlier in this chapter) that attract workers to her and stimulate brood-rearing, foraging, comb-building, and other activities. Also referred to as queen substances, these pheromones play an important role in controlling the behavior of the colony: Queen substance keeps the worker bees from making
