When we say "bees", you probably think of an animal that lives all over the world – the social bees in the hive, which have queens who give birth to all the offspring for the entire colony.
But if "bees" refers to all species of the family of bees, then most bees do not actually have queens.
The total family of bees is a large group, there are about 20,000 species in the world, and the population may exceed 2 trillion, and the vast majority of them are not even social and they can live well without a queen or colony.
These queenless bees, the females lay their eggs alone in a simple nest – either in plant stems or in underground tunnels. They only provide each egg with a pollen ball that is mixed with the nectar she collects from the flowers, and then allows the eggs to hatch and develop on their own, without any assistance.
©Sharadpunita
These bees are often very beautiful in appearance and are important pollinators for many crops and plants, but many people may not realize that they are also bees.
The interesting question then is, since many bees can successfully live without a queen, how exactly did the queen evolve?
Queens, worker bees, and drones
In addition to honey bees, there are two species of bees that have queens, the bumblebee, which is found on all continents except Australia and Antarctica, and the stingless bee, which is found mainly in the tropics.
A honey-harvesting hive can contain up to more than 50,000 bees, while carnivorous hornets typically have only a few hundred individuals, and stingless colonies are usually smaller, but some are as large as the largest hives.
In addition to the queen bee who lays eggs, the social structure of these bees has two common "jobs" – worker bees and drones.
Many people may not know much about how the various positions of a bee colony are divided, which is actually quite interesting.
The queen bee is undoubtedly the one who lays eggs – the whole colony of bees comes from the queen bee in the colony, but it also has a job to adjust the ratio of worker bees to drones.
The bee we see is basically Marc Andrighetti, a worker bee ©
All worker bees are females like queens – they develop from the queen's fertilized eggs, and all the work of the colony is done by the worker bees, including tending to the colony, collecting food, and defending the nest...... Wait a minute.
Although worker bees rarely lay eggs, many studies have found that they do do lay eggs, but the eggs laid by worker bees are quickly eaten by other worker bees, which is thought to ensure that the ratio of worker to drone bees in the colony is not disordered.
The reason why the ratio of worker bees to drones must be strictly controlled is that drones do nothing but eat in the colony - they even have to be fed by worker bees for food, and they are proper resource consumers.
Drones are haploid and develop from unfertilized eggs, they don't even have tail spines, but they are much larger, and their only function is to transmit colony genes.
Picture: The one on the mark is the queen bee, which is no different from ordinary worker bees
The Isolated "Queen"
Maybe you will imagine that a king or queen is in charge of everything and orders the existence of everyone, but for the swarm society, such a thing does not exist, the queen bee does not lead their people like the king and queen of the humans, and the queen bee does not rule over their worker bees.
On the contrary, what happens to the queen bee in the hive is quite isolated, it is like a machine, it is only responsible for laying eggs, and what eggs are laid, and it will initially adjust the ratio of worker bees to drones by laying fertilized or non-fertilized eggs according to the needs of the colony.
However, it is only a preliminary adjustment, and the final decision rests with the worker bees, who will selectively feed or kill the drones according to the resources of the colony.
On the other hand, once the queen's ability to lay eggs decreases, it will be killed by the worker bees, at which time the worker bees will select one of all the fertilized eggs to become the next queen, as long as it is fed royal jelly after it hatches.
Many people may know that a queen bee only mates once in her life – so her ability to lay eggs decreases over time, and many may wonder why this is the case.
In fact, the reason is very simple, because the risk of mating the queen bee is very high, and there is no reason for the colony to let the same bee mate multiple times.
Pictured: The dots on the back are the candidate queens, and the worker bees are encouraging them to get married
When the queen bee mates, the drone is selected, and one alternative queen flies in front, and thousands of drones from different hives chase behind, which is called wedding flight.
The Wedding Flight is the most spectacular group show in the bee world, and a whole bunch of predators are eyeing it up and trying to eat them (here's an interesting fact about the Wedding Fly of the bees, they start in the same place every year, and no one knows how the bees do it).
Therefore, it is impossible for a bee colony to let the same queen fly twice, and it would be better to find a new queen before the old queen's production capacity is zero.
Pictured: This is an ant nest, do you dare to imagine, from the Brazilian leafcutter ant
So why exactly is there a queen bee?
In fact, not only bees, but other animals also live in groups with a clear social division of labor – they also have a clear division of labor between reproducing and maintaining group members, such as ants, termites, and even naked mole rats, and they have evolved "queens".
In nature, if living beings exist for only one purpose, it must be to pass on their genes.
One way for organisms to pass on their genes is to produce their own offspring, which is quite common, and another way to help close relatives rather than having children alone.
Although it sounds unreliable to pass on genes without having to reproduce yourself, in fact many animals have been observed to do this, and even the altruistic behavior of living beings is likely to evolve this way, in fact, for the simple reason that your close relatives have similar genes to you.
Those community animals with a clear division of labor are clearly helping inbreeding to the extreme.
You may also ask why they go to the extreme of "queen bee".
The answer I found here is that the complex nest structure and the clear division of labor are the main factors that contributed to the evolution of the "queen".
The ancestors of these animals either built more complex nests to maintain the population, or to promote the division of labor, or both, and eventually moved towards the "queen" mode of survival.