Organized, adaptable, and communicative — honeybee colonies and what it means to come together to work for common good.
A single honeybee hive may contain between 20,000 to 60,000 bees. And only one of those bees is the queen. But don’t bee mistaken, bee colonies aren’t actually monarchies — rather, they are matriarchal.
This means that all female bees (worker bees), sometimes without the input of the queen bee, are involved in hive decision making — a skill bees may actually be better at than humans. Some of these decisions include who will be the queen’s successor and when and where to swarm (the process of leaving the hive to establish a new hive).
Like a perfectly designed machine, each honeybee has a purpose in the colony, and are genetically hardwired for the role they play. How these roles are determined, begins with the queen, the mother of all bees, who has the unique ability to assign the sex of her children, and thus their job within the colony.
The rest of the hive is made up of either drone or worker bees. While a hive can consist of thousands of bees, only a few hundred are drones. These are the males and they have but one, sacrificial job: mate with the queen. The remainder of their time is spent in leisure, eating honey from the reserves and waiting for the queen to take her nuptial flight.
Nearly everything else is done by worker bees. They tend to the queen, forage for food, pollinate, store honey, build cells in the hive, care for larvae, and feed the male bees. Their work is assumed almost instantly and doesn’t finish until they die; one worker bee may visit up to 20,000 flowers in their lifetime! They all work together collectively — acting as a hive mind or singular intelligence — constantly funneling information between each other and making decisions through a series of waggle dances and head butts.
The operation of a honeybee colony is nothing short of an evolutionary marvel, embodying all the qualities that allow our own societies and companies to function — teamwork, trust, reliability, resilience, and adaptability.
This WORLD BEE DAY, let’s work together to help our bees. Don’t wait — donate now.
