No fear, no ambition

If only we could bottle the essence of bee

“So why doesn’t the existing queen kill the nascent queen before she emerges in order to protect her position?” asked my friend.

He and I were about halfway round our regular Saturday morning walk, along with my dog, along the north shore of the River Forth.

He had asked what I was going to be doing later in the day. I said I was going to inspect my colonies and feared that I might find one of them had swarmed. A combination of unremitting rain and going away for a weekend had prevented me from looking into the hives for almost a fortnight. After such a gap at this time of year, you might find that they have already packed their bags, cleared out the reserves of honey and done a bunk with the queen.

He and I then got into a conversation about the nature of swarming, what it involves and why it happens. My friend is a distinguished marine architect and a clever, inquisitive guy but he knows next to nothing about bees so any discussion usually has to start from first principles.

I explained that, effectively, the swarm is a form of reproduction, with one colony producing another.

As the colony expands through Spring, with the queen laying up to 1500 eggs a day, space for the bees in the hive gets as cramped as for the population in Hong Kong, even if the beekeeper adds extra boxes. Queen cells begin to develop, heralding the imminent arrival of a new mother bee who, when she emerges, will seek out the existing queen if she’s still around and kill her in a duel. To forestall this event, scout bees go out to search for commodious new quarters, such as a hollow in a tree trunk and come back to report their findings to the whole society. The existing queen’s attendants restrict her daily intake of food in order to slim her down and make her fit for flight. The colony gets in a mood for going and then, around noon on a fine warm day, suddenly, without warning but presumably on an agreed signal, they’re off, leaving the remainder of the bees to raise their new queen. The sky will turn black with tens of thousands of bees in the air at once (as many as half the colony’s population of about 60,000 bees will swarm) as they arrange themselves into flight formation. Then they’re away.

(Swarm in the air)

It’s a mesmerising sight. As with a murmuration of starlings, you are looking at a force of nature which is determined to take its own shape and cannot be withstood or denied other than by nuclear blast. Anybody who doesn’t understand what’s going on is likely to be frightened. That includes most of the media. Every year, one or other of our local papers will run a story about terrified residents hiding in their homes as they are scared to death by a “horror swarm”. They have no idea that the primary purpose of the swarming bees is to ensure the safety of the queen and the second is to take up residence in the new quarters as promptly as possible. Preoccupied with these intentions, the bees actually present little or no threat to any humans who have sense enough to keep out of their way and let them get on with their business.

So my friend and I went through all of that and then he asked his question: “Why doesn’t the existing queen kill the nascent queen before she emerges in order to protect her position?”

I was momentarily at a loss. I had never thought of that possibility. I floundered my way towards the semblance of an answer, talking about the colony as a single super-organism whose collective interests take precedence over any consideration of individual interests. That seemed to satisfy him and I was glad to drop the question, knowing that I would be attending my club’s apiary in the afternoon where I could put it to greater experts and deeper minds.

As soon as I could, I asked one of the club’s leading authorities, “Why doesn’t the existing queen kill the nascent queen before she emerges in order to protect her position?”

His jaw almost dropped. He floundered. Then he started talking about the colony as a single super-organism whose collective interests take precedence over any consideration of individual interests and he went on to say that the existing queen simply accepts her place in the natural development of the colony and “when she’s done, she’s done. She’s knackered. She succumbs willingly to death.”

So there we have it.

Only later did I realise that my friend’s question was tied up with a fallacious presumption that seems to come into play almost instinctively whenever people talk about bees – that is the notion that they are essentially the same as us. He was supposing that the existing queen would be driven to protect her position because she would resent the arrival of a rival and fear her own death. But none of those human emotions, ambitions or fears is at work. This process cannot be seen through the lens of Macbeth or the Orkneyinga Saga, where sons routinely kill fathers for the crown and wives bump off husbands to advance the claims of a favourite lover. The queen in the colony should not be compared with Peter the Great, who knouted one of his own sons to death in order to keep him off the throne. In the first place, the queen knows no ambition. Secondly, she knows no fear. Neither of a rival nor of death.

Bees evidently aren’t afraid of dying. They make that obvious – both as individuals and as a collectivity -  whenever they repel an intruder. Whether they are seeing off a wasp or a bear, the bees hurl themselves into the assault, regardless of the certainty that stinging the enemy will cause their own death.

(Honeybee defending the hive against a wasp)

Similarly, the females literally work themselves to death in the course of a few weeks in the breeding season and usually die on the job. They evince no fear of the unavoidable outcome of their labours.

It is said that bees can sense fear in the beekeeper but I know of no evidence for that claim and suspect it’s just another of the folk tales that swarm around beekeeping.

They are commonly said to possess “a fear pheromone” which, when released, alerts the colony to danger but I see that not as evidence of fear but as a defensive mechanism which is purely utilitarian. The emotion of fear doesn’t come into it, so far as I can see.

You can scare a horse or a dog by a wrong look. You can scare an elephant. You can scare a shark or a Black Mamba but nothing on earth will scare a bee.

Well, maybe a nuclear blast might give them pause but short of that…