Why do bees have queens? 2 biologists explain this insect’s social structure – and why some bees don’t have a queen at all

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Why do bees have queens? – Rhylie, age 8, Rosburg, Washington

If you suppose “bee,” you seemingly image one species that lives all around the world: the honey bee. And honey bees have queens, a feminine who lays basically all the eggs for the colony.

However most bees don’t have queens. With about 20,000 species of bees worldwide — that’s about 2 trillion bees — the vast majority of them don’t even stay in teams. They just do high-quality with out queens or colonies.

As a substitute, a single feminine lays eggs in a easy nest, both inside a plant stem or an underground tunnel. She offers every egg with a ball of pollen blended with nectar that she collected from flowers, and he or she leaves the eggs to hatch and develop on their very own. She doesn’t have anybody to assist with this course of.

These bee species, usually spectacularly lovely, are necessary pollinators of many crops and crops, although most individuals aren’t even conscious of them.

Since a lot of bees efficiently stay with out a queen, what’s it that queens present for the bee species that do have them? We’re behavioral ecologists who examine social bugs, and this query is on the coronary heart of our analysis.

A queen, staff and drones

Together with honey bees, two different kinds of bees even have queens: bumble bees, that are discovered on all continents besides Australia and Antarctica, and stingless bees, that are discovered primarily in tropical areas.

One honey bee colony — additionally referred to as a hive — could have greater than 50,000 bees, whereas bumble bee colonies normally have only a few hundred bees. Stingless bee colonies are sometimes small, however some are as giant as the most important honey bee hives.

These bees’ social buildings have two extra issues in frequent in addition to the egg-laying queen: the feminine staff who look after the colony, and the males, typically referred to as “drones.”

Discover the males usually are not included within the “employee” group. Males usually don’t assist gather nectar or pollen, shield and preserve the hive, or look after the younger larvae. The females do all of these jobs.

As a substitute, the males have one job: to seek out after which mate with a feminine who could grow to be a future queen. After constructing their energy, males depart the hive to hitch 1000’s of different drones to attend for brand new queens which are additionally searching for mates. If males are fortunate sufficient to mate, they die quickly afterward. In distinction, females usually mate with many alternative males earlier than beginning their lives as egg-laying queens.

The remoted queen

Possibly you think about a queen because the one in cost, ordering everybody round. However that’s a case of language being deceptive. In contrast to human queens who lead their folks, bee queens don’t rule over their staff.

As a substitute, significantly for honey bees, the queen is fairly remoted from what’s taking place within the hive. Bear in mind, she simply lays eggs, as much as 2,000 in a day. The employees encompass and handle her whereas managing the colony. The queen bee may stay for a number of years, for much longer than feminine employee bees and drones.

Different animals additionally stay in social teams with a division of labour between those that reproduce and those that preserve the colony. Ants, termites and a few wasps — like yellow jackets and hornets — have an analogous sort of colony construction. So does the bare mole rat. Why did these teams evolve to have queens?

Household ties

A method for an organism to go on genes is by having offspring.

One other method is to assist shut family members, who’re prone to share a lot of your identical genes, to supply extra offspring than they might in the event that they had been on their very own.

This feature is just about what occurs in a bee colony. These 1000’s of feminine employee bees could not themselves reproduce, however the queen is their mom. They assist her produce one other era of siblings who will in the future be their sisters. On this method, the feminine employee bees are passing their genes on to the subsequent era, simply indirectly.

One thing else to think about: A honey bee hive is a splendidly complicated construction. The layers of wax combs constructed to retailer honey and lift offspring are a marvel of structure and require a big workforce for building, ongoing repairs and safety from intruders or predators.

So that you may ask: Which got here first? Social teams with queens and staff producing giant numbers of associated offspring that required extra elaborate nest buildings? Or did the complicated nest come up first, which led to larger success for teams that advanced to divide duties amongst queens and staff?

These are fascinating questions that biologists have been exploring for many years. However each of those elements — the division of labour and the complicated hive buildings — assist clarify why there are bees with queens.

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Phil Starks, Affiliate Professor of Biology, Tufts College and Aviva Liebert, Professor of Biology, Framingham State College

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