Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Regulating the duties
The colony can, however, alter this progression of duties if it needs to. If, for example,
the colony's forager bees are killed by pesticides, then younger bees will become foragers
sooner and may miss out an intervening stage. On the other hand, if all the younger
nurse bees who feed the brood are removed, older forager bees will revert to being nurse
bees, and this is no mean feat: their food-producing glands have atrophied by the time
they become foragers and have to become active again in order for them to produce
brood food.
One of the pheromone chemicals that regulates this progression of work is ethyl oleate.
Possibly spread around the colony by mouth-to-mouth contact, this pheromone slows
down the development of younger bees. Older forager bees carry some 30 times as
much of this chemical as younger bees do so, if there are plenty of foragers bringing in
the honey, there will be plenty of ethyl oleate in the hive, and this will keep younger bees
from developing into foragers. However, should the colony run low on mature foragers
(for example, due to spray poisoning), the supply of this grow-slow pheromone will
dwindle, and young bees will mature rapidly to fill in the ranks. When foragers again
abound, a new abundance of the pheromone will slow the replacement process.
Living in a state of dynamic equilibrium
The whole colony, therefore, lives in a state of dynamic equilibrium, ready to alter or
amend its priorities and population ratios at any given time, but only and always for the
colony's benefit and survival. The beekeeper can't change any of this but can work with
the flow by helping to ensure that external factors, such as lack of shelter, starvation,
disease, queen failure and so on, are minimized and remedied swiftly if they do occur.
The worker bee, then, is an immensely complex creature that has given up her right to
reproduce in exchange for furthering the cause of her genetic propagation via a single
laying queen. This evolutionary trait, however, is apparently not yet complete. If the
queen dies and colony attempts to raise another queen fail, then the ovaries of certain of
the workers will enlarge and they will begin to lay eggs. However, the colony is doomed
because, as workers have no apparatus for mating, the eggs will result in unfertilized
drone brood laid in small worker cells.
