Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
sexually mature. He takes mating flights during afternoon periods. Usually drones are
pushed out of the hive when there is little forage or when winter approaches and they
have no further purpose. Some may survive: I have found drones in hives in mid-winter
and I think that those who say that all drones are kicked out as winter approaches have
never looked in a hive over this period - for very good reasons.
So who actually controls what goes on in the hive? Which of the three castes of bees
gives direction to the whole? Who decides when to send out foragers to concentrate on
water collection rather than nectar, for example? Who is the boss?
Decision-making in the colony
For thousands of years decision-making in the colony was thought to be the mandate
of the king bee, and the politics of the bee kingdom has been discussed in topics and by
bee masters for centuries. This bee - which could be seen easily - was thought to direct
the total effort by sending out foragers for certain products and sending out his armies
for defence when required. In 1609, Charles Butler in England produced his book on
bees called
The Feminine Monarchie
(see Figure 5), in which he recognized that the king
was in fact a female and so should be called a queen.
Even Butler, however, believed that the bees obeyed this monarch in all things and
that the 'queen' kept order in the hive by using a whole hierarchy of the nobility and
other officials - princes, dukes, colonels, captains and so on - each with its own
distinguishing marks, hair tufts and tassels. The Romans even added magistrates to
the hierarchy! More recently, as we have begun to understand the dynamics of the hive
better, new research has shown that, although the queen is the mother of all the bees
in the colony and also their surrogate father (she holds the sperm in her spermatheca),
we can see that major colony activities are initiated by the cumulative group actions
of the colony's older workers and not by the queen's individual decision. For example,
scientists discovered that older workers give signals to the queen and to the rest of the
colony that it is time to swarm and leave the hive. They also initiate her swarm flight by
piping to her and telling her to fly (we look at swarming in more detail in Chapter 6).
