The Society of Bees

By Kazuki Nishiyama

I started to be interested in bees after I had been to an apiculture place on a field trip for Michele’s class. I like honey but I didn’t know anything about bees. So, I looked up bees and found an interesting convention in their life.

Kazuki, second from left, author of this research essay -- along with Toshi, left, and Moto -- learns about bees in their honeycomb from Gustavo Bourdieu, beekeeper, during a class field trip in August 2008. Click on photos for larger versions. (Photo © 2008 Michele Bourdieu)

First of all, bees have a society like men have in their nest which is called a hive. A hive is like a kingdom for bees. According to the author of "Beepedia," there are three kinds of bees in a society. One is a queen bee who keeps giving birth to the eggs of bees. Only one queen bee exists in one hive. The queen is ranked by the place in which she is laid by chance. Since she eats royal jelly, which other bees make, her size is three times as big as the other bees; and her life is thirty times as long as the other bees’ life span. She usually lives about six years.

Students, from right, Toshi, Nick and Kumiko get a close-up view of a queen bee from one of Gustavo's hives. (Photo © 2008 Michele Bourdieu)

Next, worker bees, who collect nectar for their hive, can number about a thousand in a hive. They all are female and their life span is about a month. On the other hand, male bees, the last category, can number only a few in a hive. They don’t work unlike worker bees and just keep eating honey which worker bees produce. It is said that they resemble a human father who doesn’t work and just sleeps in the house ("Beepedia").

It is interesting that a bee’s society and its rule are like a human’s. Male bees usually fight each other for copulation with the queen bee because their only job is to copulate with the queen bee. Some of them die from the fighting. But, unfortunately, if a male bee wins and he can copulate, he has to die anyway. With a male bee’s mechanism, when they copulate, their internal organs fall and they die. Moreover, other male bees are kicked out as scoundrels by the worker bees. Male bees don’t know how to get their food outside of the hive, and they die finally. "A person who doesn’t work must not eat." This is a same rule as ours.

On the other hand, like male bees that got kicked out of the hive, a queen bee also often gets kicked out of the hive. If she gets hurt or old, and she can’t lay eggs, she gets kicked out immediately as a useless bee. Of course, she doesn’t know how to get food (she has never been outside), so she has to die of hunger ("Beepedia"). She seems to resemble a human queen who has been brought up very carefully in a certain country and doesn’t know how to buy and cook food.

Gustavo explains the worker bees' process of storing nectar in the honeycomb to Nick and Toshi. (Photo © 2008 Michele Bourdieu)

Worker bees are like citizens in man’s society. Cooperating with one another, they work every day and collect nectar for their hive. According to Wenner, their means of communication for nectar is more developed and more precise than ours. When a worker bee finds a source of nectar, she just dances to transmit the source and the quality of the nectar to others. And, the others dance in same way for other bees. They transmit lots of information to others mmediately by just dancing and flapping of wings (Wenner).

There is a Japanese proverb: "The history of bees is the history of the human race." If we exploit their honey, we have to keep an environment in which bees can live.

Works Cited

"Beepedia." Cornwall Honey.co.uk. Web. 15 Sept., 2008.

< http://www.cornwallhoney.co.uk/bees.htm >

Wenner, Adrian M. "Sound Communication in Honeybees." BEE SOURCE .COM. Web. 15 Sept., 2008.
<http://beesource.com/pov/wenner/sci1964.htm>