Honey bee and Social behaviour # Zoology 3rd Semester, Unit ll

                    Honey bees are highly social or eusocial  because they express  following three levels of characteristics in the bee hive:

(1) Reproductive Division of Labour:

In a colony all bees are ron-reproductive  and engaged in the growth , maintanance and defence of the colony except the queen (the fertile female).

(2) Cooperative brood care : 

Queen's offsprings are cared by workers .

(3) Overlapping generation :

A perrenial queen coexist with  offsprings i.e.workers & drones of new generations.

Social structure:

Out of 50,000 to 80,000 bees of a bee-hive only one is reproductive female i.e. the queen , a few hundreds are drones (males) and rest are workers (non-replicative males).

Queen : She lays 1 --200/day or 15 lakh eggs during the life time . At old age the queen  as well as pheromones turns weak and a new queen is raised by swarming .

Drones : They live only to mate the queen .

Workers:Brood care, maintanance of hive , defence are performed by workers .

Bees show Temporal Polyethism i.e. age related division of labour :

Young workers : They worked at the centre of the hive , where brood i.e. immature bee is present.They clean brood cells ,feed and tend the brood  & queen too .

Aged workers:  They worked at the outer part of the bee-hive and build comb , receive and store  nectar & pollen  , process honey and ventilate the hive .

Old workers: They guard the hive , remove dead bees from hive & forage the hive and work from outside the hive .

All bees of a hive work together to run the colony , hence , superorganism .They perform :

(1) Thermoregulation: 

They do fanning air over water droplet to keep hive temperature 34°C  but worker bees cluster around the broodnest and vibrate wing muscle to generate heat if temperature fall down below 34°C.

(2) Respiration:

Worker bees inhale and exhale air through the entrance of the colony to maintain air purity in the hive.

(3) Reproduction : To make a new colony , swarming is done .The mother queen leaves the old bee-hive with ²/3 rd of offsprings in search of new nest by keeping new born queens and rest bees .If there is more than one young queen in the old bee hive , only the first will survive by killing others .This phenomenon is called Swarming .