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Iowa Honey Producers Association |
The Buzz Newsletter June 2007 |
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In Hive or Castle, Duty The New York Times By NATALIE ANGIER I never much cared for royalty, although I admit that, for reasons my family and I are still struggling to understand, I named my first cat “Princess Bubbles.” Nevertheless, as I watched Queen Elizabeth II float serenely last week through her swooning colonial multitudes, here chatting with Goddard engineers on the wonders of the space age, there catching the president on blunders about the queen’s age, I couldn’t help but doff a small mental tiara to the great lady. Such sober poise and unpompous stances! She’s majestic, all right, her regalness clearly born, made and thrust upon her every day of her life. In so many ways, Elizabeth reminded me of another monarch I admire: the honeybee queen, that stoical, beloved mother to the worker masses in a beehive. Sure, Her Highness may go in for pastel solids and Her Hymenoptera for fuzzy stripes, but both are tiny, attractive celebrities prone to being swarmed. Both are kept meticulously well-groomed by a retinue of handlers and are fed high-quality foods generally unavailable to the proletariat. Both are, yes, long-lived. And both share the dubious honor of having enormous social responsibility but very little power. “The queen bee, like the queen of England, is not the ruler, and she doesn’t tell anybody what to do,” said Gene E. Robinson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “But she makes things work, and she makes everything better by being around.” Dr. Robinson and other researchers are trying to understand the deep nature of the honeybee: why it behaves as it does, how a young bee knows it’s time to grow up and get out of the house, how an older bee finds its way back to the house after a hard day’s work, and what distinguishes a queen bee from the tens of thousands of worker bees that surround her. The researchers are driven by more than a perfectly
understandable besottedness with bees. They see bees, with their
comma-sized brains, compact genomes and circumscribed set of stereotyped
behaviors, as offering a relatively simple and politically unobjectionable
system for deciphering the biology of behavior. To that end, they
are mapping out the chemical sequence of honeybee DNA and recently
published a rough draft of the bee’s 11,000 or so genes. Unlike the great bee die-offs of the past, when mites or other deadly pathogens left mounds of bee corpses lying by the hives, in the newest crisis there are as yet no bee bodies to forensically explore. The bees are simply flying off by the billions as though into the void. When beekeepers check affected nests, the combs are filled with pollen and honey, but there is almost nobody home: the workers have largely vanished, leaving the queen in an unnatural state of quiet near-solitude, helpless on her own. That a queen cannot survive without her court is a testament to the incomparable interdependence of social insect society, the pulsing, groupthinking superorganism that is the honeybee hive. Honeybees in a colony are as close-knit as cashmere, sharing up to three-quarters of their genes, compared with the 50 percent link between human siblings, and that strong kinship helps explain their highly cooperative style. They are also nearly all female. Less than 1 percent of the hive dwellers are drones, short-lived, bug-eyed males built to mate once with a queen before dropping dead to the ground with an audible pop. There is no top-down structure to honeybee society, no central command post or leaders with whips. Power is disseminated through the hive, and daily decisions about, say, whose turn it is to feed the larvae, take out the trash or fan the nectar into honey are made consensually and regionally, through a constant exchange of chemical, tactile and visual cues. “It’s a lot of local responses to local stimuli,” Dr. Robinson said. “Little things collectively give rise to decisions.” As for the queen, she is so far from being a
decisive potentate that she can seem goofily out of the loop.
When a colony is ready to move to a new hive, for example, about
three dozen scout bees appraise the local real estate, consult
with one another and with other workers and finally, communally,
settle on the best new spot. Come moving day, the queen has no
idea where to go and must be shown the way. Day in, day out, the queen remains in her climate-controlled chamber laying eggs, one or two per minute, maybe 2,500 a day. All the while she is pushed, provisioned and plucked by her retinue of nurses, her bristles kept spotless, her mandibles kept stuffed with the nutritious, high-calorie, egg-enabling delicacy called royal jelly. “I’d say that being queen is the absolute worst job in the hive,” said May R. Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois. “At least the foragers get out for fresh air and some scenery.” What the queen lacks in liberty, though, she makes up for in longevity. Whereas worker bees live only two or three months, a queen lives two or three years, and some have been known to survive to age 8. Scientists are just beginning to understand how the queen so dramatically outlives her workers, when she and they arise from the same genetic roots. Dr. Robinson and his colleagues reported last month that a queen’s early exposure to royal jelly, which allowed her to mature into a queen rather than a worker, may offer her a lifetime of antioxidant protection against cellular decay. However she manages, the queen bee defies the normal rule in biology that organisms must choose between a long life and high fecundity. Her loyal subjects need her, and so she doughtily broods on. Now will they please return the favor and come back home?
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