Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
than those that tended the larvae in the nest. He concluded that there
must be a division of labor based on age, with older bees tending the
nest and younger bees foraging. He was correct in his assessment of an
age-based division of labor, but because of his anthropocentric view of
maturation and puberty, he had the age relationship reversed. Newly
emerged bees are covered with branched hairs that break of as they
age. Foragers are older and ot en look shiny and nearly hairless. As bees
age, they progress through changes in their location in the hive and the
behavioral tasks they perform. When they i rst emerge from their cells
as adults, they engage in cleaning cells in the brood nest. When they
are about a week old, they feed and care for larvae. h is activity is fol-
lowed by tasks associated with nest construction and maintenance, food
processing, receiving nectar from foragers, and guarding the entrance,
among others. In about their third or fourth week of life, they initiate
foraging. As foragers, they tend to specialize in collecting pollen or nec-
tar; their specialization is demonstrated by a bias in the amount of each
they return to the nest. Once they initiate foraging, they seldom per-
form any within-nest tasks for the duration of their short lives of 5 to 6
weeks.
1.2 Summary Comments
In this chapter, I introduced the concept of the spirit of the hive and the
unresolved questions of Maeterlinck about what it is and where it re-
sides. In the next chapter, I will describe the mechanistic processes
through which coordinated activities are orchestrated by a “crowd of
bees working in a dark hive.”
Suggested Reading
Darwin, C. 1998.
h e Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, h e
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
. New York: Modern
Library.
Fewell, J. H., and Winston, M. L. 1992. Colony state and regulation of pollen
foraging in the honey bee,
Apis mellifera
L.
Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol.
30:387- 393.
