Bees don't die when they sting. They have a barbed stinger, human skin is elastic and that's why they get stuck. Our first reaction is to swat or swipe on the site of stinging which rips their stinger off by force. If you leave the bee alone, it will wiggle and twirl around, trying to get itself unstuck and sometimes that is successful, sometimes they're fucked. The bee didn't really commit suicide when stinging, you killed it.
Also, did you know that the queen bee has almost full control over their offspring? It works like this: The queen bee only mates once in her life during the nuptial flight and stores the sperm in her spermatheca (like a sperm sac), the drone usually dies in the process because mating tears their endophallus off and the trauma kills him. After founding a colony the queen can now choose whether to fertilize her eggs or not and if she does, a female larva will hatch from the fertilized egg, else a drone larva will hatch through a process called haploid parthenogenesis.
The destiny of becoming a queen or a worker depends entirely on the diet the female larva is fed: all larvae are fed royal jelly (a special secretion from worker bees) for a few days and then worker bees are switched to what is called bee bread which is a mix of pollen and nectar while future queens stay on the royal jelly diet. The royal jelly lets the bees develop their ovaries, making them capable of laying eggs. Technically, all worker bees can lay eggs (which could only produce drones), but in a healthy colony, they will be switched off the royal jelly soon enough so that this rarely occurs.
So, in a way, worker bees can stage a mutiny if they are unhappy with their current queen by feeding a larva royal jelly, rearing a new queen.
Do they isolate the queen larva to prevent other larva from eating its food? Or is it like a baby bird scenario where they're just fed directly from bee to bee? Are mistakes sometimes made, and if so do they "correct" the mistake?
Royal jelly for queens is stored in special compartments that are constructed specifically to rear a new queen and they drop the larvae in there. Wikipedia has a pic.
Bees don't die when they sting. They have a barbed stinger, human skin is elastic and that's why they get stuck. Our first reaction is to swat or swipe on the site of stinging which rips their stinger off by force. If you leave the bee alone, it will wiggle and twirl around, trying to get itself unstuck and sometimes that is successful, sometimes they're fucked. The bee didn't really commit suicide when stinging, you killed it.
Also, did you know that the queen bee has almost full control over their offspring? It works like this: The queen bee only mates once in her life during the nuptial flight and stores the sperm in her spermatheca (like a sperm sac), the drone usually dies in the process because mating tears their endophallus off and the trauma kills him. After founding a colony the queen can now choose whether to fertilize her eggs or not and if she does, a female larva will hatch from the fertilized egg, else a drone larva will hatch through a process called haploid parthenogenesis.
The destiny of becoming a queen or a worker depends entirely on the diet the female larva is fed: all larvae are fed royal jelly (a special secretion from worker bees) for a few days and then worker bees are switched to what is called bee bread which is a mix of pollen and nectar while future queens stay on the royal jelly diet. The royal jelly lets the bees develop their ovaries, making them capable of laying eggs. Technically, all worker bees can lay eggs (which could only produce drones), but in a healthy colony, they will be switched off the royal jelly soon enough so that this rarely occurs.
So, in a way, worker bees can stage a mutiny if they are unhappy with their current queen by feeding a larva royal jelly, rearing a new queen.
Bees are awesome.
Love it, thank you for this.
Do they isolate the queen larva to prevent other larva from eating its food? Or is it like a baby bird scenario where they're just fed directly from bee to bee? Are mistakes sometimes made, and if so do they "correct" the mistake?
Royal jelly for queens is stored in special compartments that are constructed specifically to rear a new queen and they drop the larvae in there. Wikipedia has a pic.