Worker Bees Rebel After the Queen Dies

Worker Bees Rebel After the Queen Dies

A hive of bees can descend into chaos when the queen dies, with worker bees abandoning their usual roles to indulge in hedonistic pleasures.

The absence of a queen causes worker bees to relinquish their typical function of regulating the colony’s reproductive behavior, leaving the hive vulnerable to parasitic bees from other colonies.

Yet, amidst the turmoil, the worker bees engage in a reproductive frenzy, aiming to produce one last generation of males to perpetuate their lineage before the colony collapses.

Professor Benjamin Oldroyd from the University of Sydney, Australia, and his Thai colleagues studied what happens when an Asian honeybee colony (Apis florea) loses its queen.

They discovered that the number of parasitic foreign worker bees doubled. Nearly half of these parasitic bees had active ovaries, compared to only 20% of the native workers.

“Controlling worker reproduction is essential for maintaining reproductive balance and protecting the colony from parasitic bees. However, when the queen dies, the workers are compelled to abandon their regulatory role and begin laying their own eggs,” Oldroyd explained.

The worker policing system, discovered in 1989, ensures that if a worker bee lays eggs, they are eaten by other workers. However, a queenless colony faces extinction if it cannot raise a new queen from one of the worker sisters or produce a final batch of male offspring to mate with queens from other colonies.

“The study highlights that each bee colony is a complex, balanced society that functions effectively due to the policing of worker behavior. Once that system breaks down, the colony disintegrates,” Oldroyd said.