A working year with honeybees

A honeybee colony is not a monarch plus servants. It is one reproductive female, tens of thousands of workers who are also female, and a seasonal cast of males whose job is mating.

The queen lays eggs. She does not rule in the way the word suggests. Workers feed her, and chemical signals she produces — the mix beekeepers call queen substance — help hold the colony’s behavior together. If she is failing, the workers know before a person looking at the hive does. They raise a replacement by feeding a young larva the richer diet that makes a queen rather than a worker. The same egg can become either. Caste, for the females, is food and timing, not a different kind of birth.

Worker tasks tend to shift with age. A newly emerged bee cleans cells. Older bees nurse brood, then build and repair comb, then handle nectar and guard the entrance, then forage. That progression is a tendency, not a punch clock. A colony short on foragers will send younger bees out sooner. A colony with plenty of foragers will keep younger bees inside. Thomas Seeley’s work on how colonies divide jobs is the cleanest account of this: the hive is not following a foreman’s list. It is a set of responses to what the colony currently lacks.

Foragers are not wandering. A scout who finds flowers comes home and dances. The waggle dance, done on the comb in the dark, encodes direction relative to the sun and a sense of distance. Other bees follow the dance, then fly the trip themselves. It is not a language in the human sense. It is a precise advertisement, and it is good enough that a colony can shift its whole field force onto a better patch of flowers in an afternoon. Honey on the shelf starts as this argument, repeated thousands of times, about which patch is worth the flight.

Drones appear when the colony can afford them, mostly in late spring and summer. They are male, they have no sting worth mentioning, and they do not gather nectar. Their job is to find a virgin queen in the air, at the congregation areas drones use year after year, and mate. Mating kills the drone. The ones who never mate are still a cost. In temperate climates workers often drag them out and refuse them entry as winter approaches, because a mouth that does not forage is a liability when flowers are gone. The eviction looks cruel only if you expected the colony to be a household. It is a budget.