It is fascinating and also instructive to understand how bees are organized. The hive is in fact still one of the most advanced social structures in nature, they are on par with anthills and few other animals are able to show off such a high level of organization and practicality.
As we will discover in this article, each one has its own role in the hive , knows what it has to do and does it without much discussion, there is a sense of belonging to one’s family and the awareness that one must reproduce in order not to become extinct. These animals can undoubtedly teach us a lot and show us which defects of our human society we can correct and how. And to think that it is a structure that was not studied at a table, I am referring to the hive, but was born like this, spontaneously. Observing it from the outside it seems that everything was calculated by a latest generation PC.
How are bees organized: geometry
Even the shape of the hive itself does not follow the rules of aesthetics, although it is very beautiful, but follows those of logic and efficiency. This structure is composed of hexagonal honeycombs precisely because the perfect hexagon is the geometric figure where the ratio between perimeter and area is most advantageous . Only the circle beats it. Why so much attention to these proportions? Because the cells must be as large as possible but at the same time they must not waste too much material during construction, since the honeycomb is built with the wax that the bees themselves must produce. So the hexagon ensures maximum efficiency , minimum waste. It is a geometry lesson that we must learn.
Bee Hierarchies and Queen Bee
It is not only the shape of the hive that is highly organized but the society that lives there has a rigid hierarchy necessary to ensure that everything proceeds for the best. In the “people” of bees there is a real social hierarchy , a pyramid on top of which naturally stands the queen bee but the entire social structure is highly organized, nothing is left to chance.
It can happen that the queen bee, for health reasons or other reasons, is forced to leave her hive together with her entire family. A power vacuum that in human society could lead to a real moment of crisis or violence. What happens in the society of bees? The queen does “swarming” , that is, she leaves a fair number of eggs in the same hive, even a couple of thousand.
In the absence of the queen, the bees that were not part of the swarming instinctively know that they must “recreate” a queen. They do not have a great alternative, if they do not do it they die, because their average life is about 30 days. If a successor to the queen does not arrive, the family would become extinct because there would no longer be generational turnover . In all this reasoning I have taken for granted something that it is better for me to clarify. In the entire hive, the only one capable of laying eggs.
How is the absence of the queen bee managed?
The bees left without a queen, in order to create another one that will ensure the continuation of their family, choose a few dozen eggs from the thousands they have and begin to feed them with royal jelly, and not only honey and pollen, even before the caterpillar is born, more precisely three days after they are laid. This special diet will make the bees potential queens because it is the quality of the food that marks their destiny.
We reason by social classes: a caterpillar that eats only honey and pollen will become a worker, those that eat royal jelly will become a queen. There is no social elevator in the society of bees, this is one of the few things that it is better not to imitate from these little animals.
The caterpillar fed with royal jelly makes it develop much better and makes it able to lay eggs, because it allows the development of the organs needed for laying. These royal caterpillars after ten days of life become “giants”, much more developed than all the others that have fed on pollen.
Natural selection in bee society
It is not just one but several caterpillars so fed, then comes the time to select the future queen . The eggs are not laid at the same time but at a distance from each other, every time one hatches the nurse bees check the conditions of the insect that is born and evaluate if it is worthy of becoming the queen of the hive. It may happen that it is not perfect, then it is killed and they wait to see what comes out of the eggs that hatch in the following days. As soon as a perfect insect comes out, that becomes the queen bee. Natural selection is therefore the criterion that determines the choice of the queen bee.
She will not be able to lay eggs right away, however, because she needs to have intercourse with the male bee. This usually happens within 10 days at the most. The mating moment is characterized by the nuptial flight and at least 100 males participate, all of whom mate with the queen alone, who is able to retain their sperm for her entire life inside an organ that only the queen has and which is called the “spermatheca” . In a second organ, however, she can retain her eggs.
After this wedding ritual, the queen bee will remain “closed in the house” to lay eggs, deciding whether to fertilize them or not. The fertilized ones will become females, the most important because they do everything for the hive, the others, not fertilized, will be males, the lowest in the social hierarchy and most useless.