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Why do bees have queens? – Rhylie, age 8, Rosburg, Washington
When you think of “bees,” you probably think of one species that lives all over the world: the honey bee. And honeybees have queens, a female who basically lays all the eggs for the colony.
But most bees don’t have queens. With about 20,000 species of bees in the world – that’s about 2 trillion bees – most of them don’t even live in groups. They do fine without queens or colonies.
Instead, a single female lays eggs in a simple nest, inside a plant stem or in an underground tunnel. She provides each egg with a ball of pollen mixed with nectar she has collected from flowers, and leaves the eggs to hatch and develop on their own. She has no one to help with this process.
These species of bees, often extremely beautiful, are important pollinators of many crops and plants, although most people are not even aware of them.
Since many bees can survive without a queen, what do queens provide for their bee species? We are behavioral ecologists who study social insects, and this question is at the heart of our research.
A queen, workers and drones
Along with honey bees, two other types of bees also have queens: bumble bees, which are found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, and stingless bees, which are found mainly in tropical areas.
A single honey bee colony – also known as a hive – can have more than 50,000 bees, while bumble bee colonies usually only have a few hundred bees. Colonies of stingless bees are often small, but some are as large as the largest honey bee hives.
The social structures of these bees have two other things in common besides the queen who lays eggs: the female workers who take care of the colony, and the males, sometimes called “drones”.
Note that men are not included in the “worker” group. Males generally do not help collect nectar or pollen, protect and maintain the hive, or care for the young larvae. The females do all those jobs.
Instead, the males have one task: to find a female and then mate with a female who may become a queen in the future. After building up their strength, males leave the hive to join thousands of other drones to wait for new queens who are also looking for mates. If males are lucky enough to mate, they die soon after. In contrast, females usually mate with many different males before beginning their lives as egg-laying queens.
The isolated queen
You might imagine a queen as the one in charge, ordering everyone around. But that’s a case of language being misleading. Unlike human queens who rule over their people, queen bees do not control their workers.
Instead, especially for honey bees, the queen is relatively isolated from what is happening in the hive. Remember, she only lays eggs, up to 2,000 per day. The workers surround and care for her while managing the colony. The queen bee may live for a few years, much longer than female worker bees and drones.
Other animals also live in social groups and labor is divided between those who reproduce and those who maintain the colony. Ants, termites and some wasps have a similar colony structure – like yellow jackets and hornets. So does the naked mole rat. Why did these groups evolve to have queens?
Family ties
One way for an organism to pass on genes is to have offspring.
Another way is to help close relatives, who are likely to share many of the same genes as you, to produce more offspring than they would if they were alone.
This selection is pretty much what happens in a bee colony. Thousands of female worker bees may not reproduce themselves, but the queen is their mother. They help her produce another generation of sisters who will one day be sisters. In this way, the female worker bees are passing their genes on to the next generation, but not directly.
Another thing to consider: A honey bee hive is an incredibly complex structure. The rows of wax combs built to store honey and raise offspring are an architectural wonder and require a large workforce for construction, constant repairs and protection from intruders or predators.
So you might ask: Which came first? Social groups with queens and workers producing large numbers of related offspring required more elaborate nest structures? Or did the complex nest evolve first, allowing groups that evolved to divide tasks between queens and workers to be more successful?
These are fascinating questions that biologists have been investigating for decades. But these two factors – division of labor and complex hive structures – help explain why bees have queens.
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This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.
Written by: Phil Starks, Tufts University and Aviva Liebert, Framingham State University.
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The authors do not work for, consult with, or own shares in, or receive funding from, any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
