#worker bees‚ which don't mate‚ make up most of the bee population

[abluehappyface]

I should be in bed but why is the main euphemism for sex "the birds and the bees" when like 99% of bees don't fuck

[philosophicalparadox]

Also, culls are an important part of keeping any living thing that is going to be breeding as a part of your charge of it. You just. You have to cull. You have no choice if you want stable, healthy populations of animals.

Also, cull does not mean kill. It just means "to remove from the breeding population". In the case of bees, yes, that does generally involve killing them, because European honeybees are an invasive species in most parts of the world, so it's not like it's ethical to just throw a new queen into the woods and let her start a hive by herself, which is exactly what people used to do. European farmers who brought european bees that they were used to just releasing into the wild in their native europe did the same thing everywhere they went. Now you have feral colonies of honeybees showing up in swarms all over the world and making nests in tree hollows better reserved for actual native bee species.

Fortunately European honey bees are domesticated and therefore actually drawn to humans and human habitat. That's why so many feral colonies set up home in attics and under the eaves of houses. They like humans. They've been bred to like humans for millennia.

And all this to say that bees are classified as livestock. You can't own livestock and not take care of them. Part of taking care of them is ensuring that they have a healthy queen at all times. New queens in a colony are genetically siblings. If you let a emerging queen take over an existing hive, she will mate with her brothers, the drones, almost immediately. Bees and insects in general don't have the same kinds of issues with inbreeding that mammals do but you still will eventually get a generation of weaker, immune compromised bees if you let it happen.

Plus, when a colony produces more queens, they produce about 5-6 at a time. In most cases those queens will be seen off by the workers, who may even kill them if their existing queen is still viable. If she is not, then the workers will let the young queens, who never lose their stinger and have massive venom sacs, sting each other to death until the emerging victor becomes their new queen. Assuming she doesn't die from the stress, which about 50% do.

Then the colony is left queen-less, and they die. A worker bee lives for about two months. A queen can live 20 years. So having a queen the colony accepts at all times is imperative.

Which is the other thing - bees choose their queens, not the other way around. The colony collectively has to agree that a new queen is A) needed and B) acceptable before you can introduce one. That's what queen cages are for, not for keeping a new queen from leaving, but to keep the workers from killing her in case they change their mind and decide she's not up to snuff, a process that takes about two weeks. Bees are very suspicious creatures, very cautious of new management (courtesy some interesting hive parasites) so it takes them a while to warm up to a new queen.

Also, you can't really keep bees from leaving. You can try, by tempting them to stay, but if they want to swarm they will. And you can't stop them. You can prevent it by splitting the hive so they aren't so crowded they feel like they should swarm, but ultimately if they've already decided it you won't change their mind.

Honeybees are pretty independent little critters, and they have a collective intelligence. They won't stay someplace they dont really like. They especially won't stay someplace where their queen is regularly injured as you suggest, and will in fact kill a queen who has been in any way damaged. That's why when you're importing queens for a hive, you always get at least 3. Not only are bees picky about their management but if for some reason the new queens are hurt or stressed the hive will maul them to death, whether they have a queen themselves or not. More reasons for a queen cage.

Wild that folks keep saying beekeepers abuse bees as if bees are not both venomous flying animals and fully unionized

[ata-lanta]

Hiii, I have some bee questions :D I know I could probably just google this, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask! You don’t have to answer all of them tho!!

1. Are bees more yellow and black or more orange and black?

2. How many bees normally live together in a hive (that’s what it’s called right?)?

3. And last one lol, how long does a bee usually live?

Oh my goodness BEE QUESTIONS. IT'S HAPPENING AAAAAHHHH

I'll be honest I did have to do some Googling myself because I don't have numbers memorized, but I will info-dump to make up for it.

Before I start, all my answers are going to be about European honey bees (Apis mellifera). This is the preferred species for beekeeping due to honey output and typical gentleness, and it has been introduced to lots of places for beekeeping, including North America. It's also the focus on my research so that's why I know it fairly well.

(I'm fighting the urge to go off on a tangent about Africanized bees but a) not my specialty and b) that's pretty off topic)

Now question time:

1. Honey bees are mostly black and yellow, but how light or dark they are varies based on their genetic make up. Other bees have orange coloring, for example some bumblebee species.

2. Yes it's called a hive! This number is SO variable based on how much space they have, the time of year, food availability, and colony health. Numbers I found range from 10,000 to 60,000, and I saw one site list 80,000.

Bonus info: when a colony is doing really well and has a really large population in relation to the space available in the hive, the bees will swarm. The colony will start raising new queen bees, and the old queen will leave with 60% of the worker bees to find a new hive. This is how you get new colonies. It also drives bee keepers crazy, because we want large bee populations for greater honey production.

3. INFO DUMP TIME Age depends on the type of bee!

The queen: Assuming she survives a) the initial battle royal to become queen of the colony and b) her mating flight, the queen can live 3-4 years.

Males (called drones): my favorite useless dumb-dumbs live 2 months on average

Worker bees (all female): Depends on the season! Most of the spring and summer they have a 6 week life cycle, in which they will do a lot of jobs in the colony depending on their age. Youngest care for the larvae, oldest do the dangerous work of going outside the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. In the fall, the winter bees start are born. These bees will live 6 months so they can last the winter. The colony has to conserve energy through the winter and not having to constantly raise new bees helps with that. A larger winter bee population increases chances of survival!

Finally, if a honey bee stings you, she will die right after. That's because there's a barb on her stinger that keeps it in your skin and can pull the venom sac out of the bee when she flies away. (This is also why you never pinch a stinger to get it out, since it might push more venom into you. Scrape baby scrape!) Pulling out her guts is a sure way to end her life, but it's a sacrifice she makes for the safety of the colony.

And that's more info that you probably wanted to read! THANK YOU FOR ASKING!!!

[systlin]

How do bee sexes work? Most online sources I've found claim workers to be female because they can lay eggs under really specific circumstances but most of them don't have a reproductive system, the ovipositor repurposed as a stinger(?) So are they all female until proven male or a separate sex that cis-centeric researchers just don't acknowledge?

All bees but drones are female. The males cannot sting, as the stinger is re purposed into the genitalia, but female bees can lay eggs and sting both. Not sure where you got the idea that the stinger is re purposed into an ovipositor, as it’s not true. Queen bees have stingers, and unlike workers can sting repeatedly. They also lay eggs nearly continually. 

A queen bee mates once in her life, during her mating flight. She will mate with 7-9 drones and store the sperm in a special pouch inside her body. That sperm repository will last her the entire 6-8 years of her life. 

A queen bee can choose to lay a fertilized egg or an unfertilized egg. Fertilized eggs become female workers or queens. Unfertilized eggs become drones. In a healthy hive, drones will make up only a few percent of the total population. Their only task is to fly out daily and look for queens to mate with. Female worker bees do all the work in the hive, and the queen lays eggs 24-7-365.

If the queen is lost, worker bees can start laying eggs. They can only lay unfertilized eggs, which can only become drones. This is, evolutionary speaking, a last-ditch effort to salvage the genetic line of the hive, by producing a drone that may mate with a virgin queen from another hive. 

A hive of laying workers is a Bad Thing if you’re a beekeeper.