Working Girls

So you’re a pretty hard worker, right? Five days a week, eight hours a day, sometimes more. Feeling pretty smug about your work ethic? Let me put things in perspective.In many ways, a beehive is a great example of girl power: Every worker bee is female, and these girls call the shots. Through mechanisms not completely understood, they collectively decide whether the queen should lay worker or drone eggs, they decide when conditions are right to swarm, they even decide when it’s time to replace the queen.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and worker bees are responsible for performing every job necessary to the smooth functioning of the hive. The standard-issue worker bee lives for a short six weeks before literally working herself to death. Her job description changes as she ages, and she gets her first job the minute she hatches.

Life in the hive is, above all else, scrupulously organized, with a worker bee changing jobs every few days until she has moved through all of the required chores. Each day during the the spring and summer, approximately 2,000 worker bees are hatched in a healthy hive, so there are always plenty of new recruits to fill in as the older bees move up and out.

Early in life, a worker bee is referred to as a house bee. After three weeks, she begins taking on tasks that have her leaving the hive, and she is known as a field bee. Here are the jobs she holds, more or less in the order she holds them:

Housekeeper. After three weeks spent growing to maturity in a hexagonal cell, the worker bee hatches and immediately begins cleaning the remains of her own cocoon and bodily wastes from the cell, leaving it spick-and-span, ready for the queen to lay a new egg. In addition to cleaning out their own cells, drone cells and queen cells, housekeeping bees also clean out the empty cells left behind when honey and pollen are consumed by the colony. Honeybees are a little OCD about neatness, and with good reason. When you’re sharing your home with 80,000 relatives, you’d better keep a tidy house. Anything that doesn’t belong in the hive is dragged to the door and dumped.

Nursemaid. During the eight days between the time a honeybee egg hatches until it spins a cocoon and pupates for the final stage of growth, that larva must be fed 10,000 times. That comes out to slightly less than once a minute. And you thought caring for a human infant was hard! Besides feeding the cute little grubs, nurse bees also cap each cell with wax once the larva pupates, giving it a private cubby in which to develop. The capping remains in place until the mature bee chews her way out.

Royal attendant: The queen neither feeds nor grooms herself. Some worker bees serve as attendants, feeding and cleaning her, even removing her bodily waste from the hive. The queen attendants also collect pheromones from the queen and share it with the bees around them, who also share it, spreading its effects through the hive. When a queen dies before a new queen can be hatched, and her pheromones are no longer present in the hive, things get ugly fast. The bees become cranky, and workers, who have undeveloped ovaries under normal circumstances, begin laying eggs, which can hatch only into drones.

Construction worker. Thousands of bees work together to produce wax and build the perfectly formed hexagonal cells used for raising brood and storing food. Worker bees in this stage of development exude wax from glands in their abdomens. In addition to building cells, they use it to repair old cells and cap nectar and pollen stores brought in by other bees. Construction bees also use propolis, or bee glue, a resinous substance obtained from plants, to seal up cracks and crevices.

Climate control. Overheating is as dangerous to brood as freezing, so some worker bees will spend their days fanning hot air out or fresh air into the hive to maintain the right temperature and humidity.

Stock clerk. When a field bee returns home loaded up with pollen or nectar, workers take the groceries so the forager can head back out again. A worker uses her head to pack pollen tightly in the cells. When the cell is almost full, the pollen is topped with a layer of honey so it won’t spoil, then capped with wax, ensuring a long shelf life. Other cells are filled with nectar, which the bees continually fan in order to reduce moisture content. Once the moisture level reaches the right level, the cell is capped, and the ripe honey can stay usable virtually forever.

Undertaker. Dead and sick bees and larvae are removed from the hive, with the undertakers disposing of them as far from the hive as possible to minimize the threat of spreading diseases.

Security. A healthy hive can hold a couple of hundred pounds of honey—very tempting to other bees, wasps, even mice. Guard bees posted at each hive entrance challenge any unwelcome guest, and will fight a robber bee from another hive to the death. When a guard bee sounds the alarm, hundreds of bees will fly out and attack any perceived invader.

Grocery shopping. The hive’s oldest, wisest bees get the most difficult, dangerous job. Foraging honeybees can fly more than 5 miles to find nectar and pollen, and will travel back and forth to the hive loaded up with groceries from early morning until dusk. A bee can visit 10 flowers every minute, and may visit more than 600 flowers on each trip away from the hive. Over the course of the two to three weeks a honeybee spends foraging, she will cover about 500 miles, working until her wings are tattered and she can no longer fly. In a final act of hive caretaking, a worker will often crawl away from the hive to die, sparing her sisters the need to remove her body from the hive.

Tired yet?