Honey Bee

A superorganism

A honey bee colony is best understood as a single organism whose “cells” happen to be individual bees. A colony contains a single queen, tens of thousands of female workers, and a few hundred male drones in summer. No single bee survives long alone; the unit of life is the colony.

A divided workforce

A worker bee’s job changes with her age:

• Days 1–3 — clean cells.
• Days 4–11 — feed larvae as nurse bees.
• Days 12–17 — produce wax and build comb.
• Days 18–21 — guard the entrance.
• Days 22+ — forage for nectar, pollen, water, and propolis.

A worker who has progressed to foraging will fly until her wings literally wear out, sometimes covering thousands of kilometers in her short life.

The waggle dance

Honey bees communicate the direction and distance of food sources to their hivemates with a coded “waggle dance” performed on the vertical comb. The angle of the dance relative to vertical encodes the direction relative to the sun; the duration of the waggle phase encodes distance. Karl von Frisch decoded this language in the 1940s and won the 1973 Nobel Prize for it.

Honey

Honey is concentrated nectar — bees collect it, regurgitate and re-ingest it to add enzymes (especially invertase, which splits sucrose into glucose and fructose), and fan their wings to evaporate water until the moisture drops below ~18%. At that concentration, honey is hygroscopic and acidic enough to resist most spoilage indefinitely; honey found in Egyptian tombs has remained edible after 3,000 years.

A species in trouble

Domestic honey bee colonies in many regions have suffered severe losses since the early 2000s — the phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. The current consensus blames a combination of stressors: the Varroa mite, neonicotinoid pesticides, habitat fragmentation, and viral diseases. Native pollinators (bumblebees, solitary bees) face similar pressures.