Beekeeper Erika Thompson Explains How Bee Colonies Work

But you know bees live a very short lifespan so sometimes they'll just live out the rest of their bee life. And the bees that we see out in the world foraging, they're at the end of their short bee life. How long is a bee's life? So a worker bee, and we're talking about honey bees, Western honey bees, the ones you see me keep. The lifespan of a female worker bee varies throughout the year. So in the spring and summer, when the bees are working their hardest, the female worker bees will only live about six weeks. In the winter, when they're not doing quite as much, and when we need more bees to make it through the winter, they'll live a little bit longer and they'll live about six months. And their bodies actually change in the winter. The bees that are born later in the year and need to make it through the winter will have more fat bodies on them so that they can make it through the dirt when there's nothing in bloom and when bees are living off the honey that they collected or stored in their hive earlier in the year. And how long does the queen live? The queen can live the longest. She can live about five years. That's on the longer end. Most queens will live a little bit shorter, but she can live significantly longer than all the other bees in the hive. And then we have the worker bees who live about six weeks, six months. The queen bee can live up to five years and the drone bees will live about six months, the male bees. And what is the ratio of male bees to female bees? A honey bee colony is about 95% female. And the amount of male bees can actually fluctuate throughout the year. So when we need male bees around to mate with a queen, and they'll mate with a queen, not their queen, but when we need more male bees around, the colony will produce more male bees. In the winter, when there aren't as many resources available to the bees, the female bees will kick all the male bees out of the hive and they'll either starve or freeze to death. So right now there are no male bees in most hives. And these bees that came along with me today, there's not a single male honey bee there. They starve to death. They starve to death. They have no way of foraging. They don't do the work of bees. So most people have never seen a male honey bee before. And that's just because male honey bees are out in the world doing the work of bees. They stay in the hive or they leave and they go to drone congregation areas to mate with a queen. But they're not going to be on a flower or in your wine glass or whatnot. So the male bees don't mate with their own females. Would that be like mating with the mother? That would be like incestuous, right? So here's what happens within the colony when it's time for the queen bee to mate. So once a queen bee is born, when she reaches the ripe age of about seven days old, she'll go on a mating flight. And she may go on only one, possibly two mating flights in her entire life. And she'll fly out of the hive and she'll go to a drone congregation area, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's an area where there's a bunch of drone male honey bees flying around just waiting for a queen bee to fly by. And these drone congregation areas exist about 100 feet in the sky, which is another reason you would never see a male honey bee. But if a queen bee flies by, the fastest, strongest drones win and they will successfully mate with a queen. And the queen will mate with only about 15 to 20 drone bees and she'll have enough sperm to last the rest of her life. And what happens to the male bees is once they mate with a queen, their endophallus rips out of their abdominal cavity and they fall to the ground. And that's the end of their little bee life. Whoa. So they died during mating? They died during mating. Harsh life for a male bee. Depending how you look at it, I guess. Start from death, die when you have sex. Yes. I mean, but also, you know, his genes pass on and he's a successful male honey bee. But they also don't have to do a lot of work in the hive, you know. They don't forage for food. They don't build the hive. They don't have wax glands. They don't even have stingers. They don't defend the hive. So they have one role. So how does the males know, is it their specific time of the year where the males know that the female queen is going to be flying around? Sure. In the spring and in the summer. And that's when, you know, that's their only job. So if they're present, that's what they're trying to do. And that's why the colony controls how many drones there are. So right now in the hive, there aren't that many drone bees because they're trying to conserve the resources they have. So the honey that we eat from bees is their food source in the winter when nothing is in bloom and there's no flowers out there for them to forage from. Wow. So what are the male bees when they're inside the hive? What's their specific job? Like what kind of work are they doing when they're in there? They're really not doing a lot of work. Just hanging out, eating? Some research will show that they're contributing to the heating of the hive, but they're really not doing a lot of work, even when you see them in the colony. Not only can you distinguish them because they look different from the female worker bees, they're larger than the female worker bees, but they're not doing anything. They're walking around different. They're kind of fumbling and bumbling around. So they really don't have a lot of purpose, which is why there aren't that many of them. We have to keep in mind they only make up about 5% of the population, maybe 10, sometimes zero. So there aren't that many male honey bees, and I always love sharing with people that they probably have never seen one. So if you're ever near an observation hive or have the opportunity to go into a hive with a beekeeper, I encourage folks to do that and make sure you ask to see a male honey bee. So they fly up in the air and they put a pheromone out that lets the queen know that they're there? Yes, they'll put a drone. The drones will emit a pheromone, and these drone congregation areas still remain somewhat of a mystery. They seem to be a place that the drones will go back to annually, but we don't really know why or how they select these areas. There's some research that shows they're covered by wind. They're going to be a safe area for the bees to fly around. And they're massive. They can be 100 feet in the sky, but they can be about 500 feet wide. I mean, a ton of male honey bees flying around, just doing circles, waiting for a queen to fly by. And how does the queen detect where they are, in terms of pheromones? I think it's just the chemical pheromones. They're not flying that far from their hive area, so it's within a radius. Bees to forage will only fly about two miles. But they go every day. The drones fly out of the hive and try to mate successfully every day. So they're always doing this, and most drones will never mate with a queen. It's a small percentage of drones that mate with a queen because she only mates with maybe 15 to 20 drones. So do bees have a nose like we think of a nose? Their world very much exists through scents, but they don't really have a nose like we do. They can taste through their feet. They even have a way to taste the difference between sweet and salty through their feet. And I believe it's just glands that they're doing this through. But they have antennae too, which their antennae help them move within the colony and talk to each other and clean themselves. But yeah, they're remarkable little creatures. It's so fascinating how they have this uniform structure, the hive, with all these little catacombs and all these little combs that they create. And they all do it the same way. Yes. How do they know how to do it? Do we have an understanding of how they teach each other or is it innate in their genetics? Well, the comb building is a really interesting process because we see it as hexagonal comb, right? We see little hexagons within the hive, but they actually start off building it as circles. So the weight of the hive will bring it down. And the way that they build the comb is actually up at an angle so that the honey doesn't seep out. It's remarkable what they have figured out how to do as a species, how to engineer this perfect building and do it out of beeswax, out of something that their body produces naturally. I mean, I can think of no better example that nature has given us for a sustainable creature that can build its home out of something that comes off of its body and just live with what's around them and then always leave the world better than they found it. They're amazing. It is very fascinating. But do we have any sort of studies on what is the process that's going on within them that allows them to know when it's time to create these combs? I don't know if it's when it's time to create the combs. I mean, they start creating a comb as soon as they find a cavity to build in. Most of the comb building takes place within the first 40 days the bees will build the majority of their hive. I don't know for sure, but I would say it's just a natural instinct. When they find a place to live, they need safety and they need a place to bring up their young. The queen lays eggs in the comb. It's not just storing honey and food. This is where the bees also raise their young. I think it's just they know that they need a safe place to live, and so they start to build a beehive immediately. If the queen is a solitary queen in the hive, in the colony, what happens when females are born? The female bees are the worker bees, and they're the ones that make up about 95% of the population. They cannot lay eggs that have been fertilized, so they can lay eggs that only result in drone male bees. There's no competition between the queen and the worker bees. The queen has one job. That's to lay eggs for the colony. She is essentially the female reproductive organ of this greater being that is the superorganism of a bee colony. When the worker bees are born, they're the ones doing all the work for the hive, the other female bees besides the queen bee. When the worker bees are born, and you said they lay eggs and they can only make males? They don't lay eggs. They can. On occasion, they will if a colony is queenless, but it doesn't mean the colony can continue. Without a queen, a colony can't continue. As a last resort is the only time you will see female worker bees laying eggs in a colony. They will lay eggs that turn into bees that look different. They're male drone bees, so their larvae and their pupae look a little bit different than the worker bees. As a beekeeper, if you see a colony full of male honey bee babies, brood, eggs, and larvae, it's a sign that a colony may be without a queen. What happens then? As a beekeeper, you can introduce a new queen to the colony, and likely they'll accept her. You can also give the colony eggs from another colony that are female eggs, so female bee eggs. Any female bee egg can be made into a queen bee. If you give a colony that's queenless the opportunity to make their own queen, that's sometimes even better than introducing a new queen to them. The way that a queen bee is made is when the queen bee lays an egg, and if it's a female worker bee egg, which most of them are because, again, 95% of the colony's population is female, every bee in the first three days of their life, they're fed royal jelly. Then they're switched to a diet of pollen and a little bit of nectar. If a baby bee is fed royal jelly through the duration of its development, it turns into a queen bee. But a regular worker bee cannot give birth or cannot lay an egg that would be a queen bee or even a female bee. Correct. So where does that female bee come from? Only from a queen? Where does... Yes. So a queen can only give birth to a queen. A queen can lay both female and male bee eggs. So a female can lay a female... So when a queen knows that her time is short when she's about to die, does she make a successor? Well, it's not always the queen that knows, and it's more the colony that's making the decision. So we often think of a colony of bees being a monarchy where the queen is in charge and making all of the decisions, but that's not the case at all. It's the colony making the decisions. So it's all the worker bees. It's the collective of female worker bees making that decision. And they can take any female egg and turn it into a queen bee, not only by that diet of royal jelly, but they will also make the cell that the bee is born into a little bit bigger to accommodate the queen bee's larger body size. So it's actually the group of female worker bees that's making that decision. And the queen bee doesn't always know when she's in her final days, it's the colony that would know. Her fairmoons would get weaker and they would prepare for having a new queen and sometimes even have a new queen develop while their old queen is still alive. In the case that you have a colony with an older queen who is failing and a new queen who just emerged from a cell, the queens will fight to the death. And the best queen wins. And that's what needs to happen for the life of the bee colony. Wow, they fight to the death. What a ruthless world.