Life In A Beehive:
The epitome of connectedness.
When I lived in Berkeley, California, I’d often drive to Tilden Park, a forested nature area in the hills on the eastern side of the city. It has many hiking trails with beautiful vistas, lovely trees, a few ponds, lots of birds, and other wildlife. It was an easy 10-minute drive for me to escape urban life and enjoy peace and tranquility.
On one of such hikes I was arrested by a peculiar sound: a low but intense humming. When I stopped to investigate I noticed that it came from a tree with a big gap in it. And then I saw the bees. Hundreds or thousands of them. That’s where the sound was coming from. It was an enchanting, awe-inspiring sound, so rich and strong, but gentle and warm. It is unforgettable and remains to this day one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard.
This was before the alarming decline of bee populations which is due to a variety of factors such as excessive use of pesticides, the spread of parasitic mites, colony collapse disorder, and others. I knew very little about the importance of bees for pollination, or anything else about them, for that matter. But I was intrigued – they seemed to be this large community of beings that acted almost like a single organism. A superorganism, a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species. The individual member of this collective acts to further the wellbeing of the whole.
There can be up to 60,000 bees in one colony, but each one has a specific role within the hive. I wanted to know more about them and came up with some amazing facts: there are actually more than 16,000 known species of bees! Some live in colonies but most are solitary; some are sting-less; while most of them fly during the day, some are nocturnal. I’ll be focussing on the western honey bee (Apis mellifera), but if you want to learn more about other bee species, here's a link.
The queen seems to be like the heart of the colony and keeps it alive – if she dies without having a young queen as her successor, all the bees, the whole hive, will die as well. Because she is the only fertile female, the queen’s job is to lay eggs – depending on season and temperature, she may lay 2,500 eggs per day, one single egg into each cell of a honeycomb. She can lay unfertilized eggs which will turn into drones, male bees who don’t have a stinger and whose only job is to mate with a young queen, usually from a different colony.
After several days in her own hive a newly-hatched queen flies to an area where drones from several other hives gather. They find her because of her smell, the pheromones she excretes which she also uses to communicate with the female worker bees in her hive. Once she has mated with several drones (who die after the event – a moment of bliss, then the end…) she has gathered enough sperm to fertilize all future eggs which will become female bees. And that’s her job from then on – to lay eggs. She chooses whether it will be a drone or a worker bee; she lays a male (unfertilized) egg in a much larger cell than that used for female eggs.
The other tens of thousands of female bees do everything else, including feeding their queen, keeping her warm, removing her waste, and otherwise keeping her healthy and happy. Besides tending to her queen, a female bee has a number of tasks that keep her busy and that change depending on her age.
Right after a bee emerges from her pupa (18 - 22 days after the queen fertilized an egg) she has to clean the brood cells so they can be used again. The queen inspects her work, and if it isn’t satisfactory, the young bee has to repeat the task. She does this for about two days, until she advances to the job of a nurse: she has to feed the larvae which have hatched from the eggs with a jelly-like substance; she does this for about a week, and then she seals the cells so the larvae can transform into pupae.
There are many more tasks worker bees perform, starting with wax production when they’re about 13 - 18 days old. They feed the drones, guard the hive, seal cells filled with honey, go foraging, and do many other jobs.1
While a queen lives for three to five years on average, the life of a worker bee will last only for several weeks if she is born in the spring. Bees born in the fall can live up to eight months, spending the cold winter inside of the hive. The major task during this time is to keep the queen warm, and they form an inside cluster where the optimal temperature is 95°F (35ºC). The bees inside vibrate their wing muscles to generate heat. Other bees form an outer layer; they keep still with their heads facing inwards so that their overlapping wings form something like a sheet of saran wrap, helping with insulation. Warmer bees from the inside continually change places with the colder bees along the outer edge to allow the colder bees to warm up.
Did you know that bees have two different kinds of eyes, each with separate functions? At the center-top of a bee’s head are three small eyes called ocelli (from Latin, meaning “little eyes”), which are simple photo-receptors (light detecting organs), enabling the bee to judge light intensity and stay oriented. They also help her to maintain stability. And then she has two compound eyes, one on each side of her head, which are made up of thousands of tiny lenses called facets. Every facet is connected to a tiny tube. Each of these units, called an ommatidium, contains a lens (facet), a cone of visual cells, and pigment cells. The facets are excellent motion sensors and enable our bee to distinguish colors: Four of the pigment cells respond to yellow-green light, two respond to blue light, and one responds to ultraviolet light. The ability to see ultraviolet light allows bees to distinguish between flowers much better than a human can. They can see distinct ultraviolet markers on flowers which guide them to the nectar. And, bees can detect polarized light, meaning they can scan and match the polarization patterns in the sky. A bee’s version of GPS which helps them to navigate.2
And here is yet another captivating detail relating to bees: the structure of the honeycombs, built with a remarkably efficient pattern, the hexagonal grid. Each side of a hexagon is the same length, which results in equal-sized cells which use less wax to construct and are more resilient than squares for example. The image above shows the pattern created when the bees start building their combs, from the ceiling (in this case) downwards. Each comb has two sides divided and separated in the middle: genial!
Clearly, this article can’t come anywhere close to covering the many facts and facets relating to honey bees. Here’s an informative site where you can learn more.
Many thanks to The Bartlett Bee Whisperer, a remarkable human being who rescues bee swarms and who kindly let me use some of his photos. You can find him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Here is a link to his YouTube channel.
Please leave a comment! In fact, I wrote this post because of a comment from one of my subscribers, Xanda, who writes Light Shadow and Ink. She is working on a story for children about bees, good luck to her endeavors.
Thank you for this article about bees. 🐝 I find them so interesting & I have been wanting to learn more, so you gave me a good start!
This article, alone, is worth the subscription to access your lovely site. Thanks from a fellow New Mexican!