Worker bee

“ The Worker Bee.—The working bees form, by far, the most numerous class of the three kinds contained in the hive, and least of all require description. They are the smallest of the bees, are dark brown in colour or nearly black, and much more active on the wing than are either drones or queens. The usual number in a healthy hive varies from twelve to thirty thousand; and, previous to swarming, exceeds the larger number. The worker-bee is of the same sex as the queen, but is only partially developed. ”

“ THE WORKER BEE ON Plate V. is shown an illustration of the worker bee, which is the smallest inhabitant of the hive, but, nevertheless, does the greatest amount of work. We have already seen that there are many thousands of workers in a hive, and that each one has certain duties assigned to her. All are busy, and they work as though the future of the whole hive depended on their labours—as indeed it does. ”

“ She was especially the torment of the unfortunate drones, who, not having been gifted with stings like the workers, had no means of defence to protect them from their bullying foe. When a larva, her impatient disposition was not known. She had spun her silken web like any peaceable insect, then lain quiet and asleep as a pupa or nymph. But no sooner did the young bee awake to life, than, using her new powers with hearty good-will, she ate her way through the web at such a quick rate, that the old bees who looked in pronounced at once that she was likely to be a most active worker. ”

“ Each worker seems to be trying to outdo the others, in the endeavour to see how much work she can crowd into her little life. Laziness is unknown, and should a bee become so badly injured from any cause as not to be able to work, she is put to death, for the government of the bee-city has plenty of mouths to fill, without any useless ones. To us this may seem cruel, but we must admit that it is economical.
The duties of the workers are numerous. There are the water carriers, to supply the hive with water; the nurse bees, to look after the young ones; the foragers, who gather nectar and pollen. ”

“ The number of workers in a well-stocked hive is about fifteen thousand or twenty thousand. Upon them devolves the whole care and labour of the colony, to collect pollen, propolis, and honey; to build the combs and to attend upon the brood or young bees.
The worker-bee is short-lived, seldom surviving more than a year, but this is more from the toil they have to endure, though it be a labour of love, and the many risks they run upon each occasion of going out in search of food, &c., from the weather, or their numerous winged enemies. ”

“ It is well ascertained that the physical and temperamental differences between queen and worker-bee, widely marked as they appear, are entirely due to treatment and feeding during the larval stage. That the eggs producing the two are identical is proved by the fact that these can be transposed without confounding the original purpose of the hive. The queen-egg placed in the worker-cell develops into a common worker, while the worker-egg, when exalted to a queen’s cradle, infallibly produces a fully accoutred queen bee. ”

“ Then, a worker bee has got six thousand eyes on each side of its head so it can see the flowers that it wants to get the pollen and the nectar from. And a worker bee has got two stomachs, a little one more inside for itself, and a way bigger one more on the outside for the hive. Back on its abdomen every worker bee has got four pockets to secrete wax, and every worker has got baskets on its legs to gather pollen in, besides the nectar that they carry in their stomach for the hive. ”

“ The queen mother is developed into a highly efficient egg-laying machine, while all her worker sisters remain undeveloped sexually, and thus have time and energy to devote themselves to bringing up the young, keeping the house, getting the food, and administering the affairs of the body politic. Little wonder is it that the brain of the worker bee is much larger than that of the queen or drone, for she needs must exercise her mental powers far more than either. ”

“ The extent to which the hive makes use of the powers of its individuals is the measure of the completeness with which the social habit is developed in it. The worker bee has practically no activities which are not directly devoted to the hive, and yet she goes about her ceaseless tasks in a way that never fails to impress the observer with its exuberant energy and even its appearance of joyfulness. It is thought that the average worker bee works herself to death in about two months. ”

“ This is a wise provision of nature, for were it otherwise, the other insect and animal tribes would appropriate the treasures of the bee—honey, wax, &c., and this industrious little insect would soon become extinct.
The worker bee possesses an instinct but little inferior to reason in the human family. ”

“ In these boxes, some food is placed, and the queen put in, together with a certain number of workers, who are selected as far as possible from among the oldest bees in the hive. (The age of the bee can easily be told by its body, which becomes more polished, thinner and almost bald as it grows older; and more particularly by the wings, which the hard work uses and tears.) It is the mission of these worker-bees to feed the queen during the journey, to tend her and guard her. I would frequently find, when the box arrived, that nearly every one of the workers had died. ”

“ The eggs laid by the queen, if they are to produce workers, require about twenty-one days to bring forth the perfect bee. The newly hatched bee commences life as a nurse. When about ten days old it begins to try its wings in short flights, and a few days later it begins active work. The life of a worker bee in the busy season is only about six weeks. ”

“ Building, harvesting, storing, nursing, ventilating and cleaning from morn till night, the little worker-bee lives for about eight months, and in that time has done quite her share of work in the world. Only the young bees, born late in the season, live on till the next year to work in the spring. The queen-bee lives longer, probably about two years, and then she too dies, after having had a family of many thousands of children. ”

“ All the arts and devices of the modern bee-keeper, therefore, are set to work to overcome this timid conservatism of the hives, and to induce the creation of immense colonies of worker-bees as early as possible in the season, so that there may be no lack of labourers when the harvest is ready. ”

“ A close study of the food administered to bees when in the larval stage of their career is specially interesting, because it gives us the key to many otherwise inexplicable matters connected with hive-life. We do not know, and probably never shall know, how mere variation in diet causes certain organs to appear and certain other bodily parts to absent themselves. If the difference between queen and worker-bee were simply one of development, the worker being only an undersized, semi-atrophied specimen of a queen, there would be little mystery about it. ”

“ Bee workers are “physiologically” incapable of discharging any other function in bee society. They are females, incapable of maternity. As a result of this the queen bee is obliged to shoulder the whole burden of the reproduction of the species, and she is specialized in this direction to such an extent, that she could not possibly be a worker. The drone, as the male breeder, is in the same fix, and the popular notion that they are useless loafers, has its origin in the bee custom of applying the boot, or something worse, to all superfluous members of the drone class. ”

“ The bee with the kind of life-history just described is a worker. It has been demonstrated that the eggs which produce workers and those which produce queens do not differ, but if the workers desire to have a queen produced they tear down two or three cells around some one cell, enlarging this latter into a large vase-shaped cell. When the larva hatches from the egg in this cell it is fed for its whole larval life with bee-jelly. From the pupa into which this larva transforms issues not a worker but a new queen. ”

“ Of course the bees are black, but no darker than much of the filthy comb and honey inside the hives. By neglect, much of the worker comb has become unfit for brood-rearing, and hence drones are reared in superabundance, and these deteriorated male bees fill the air for miles in all directions, to vitiate the pure blood of all well-kept apiaries. ”

“ Pollen gathers at Hive Door
The fanning is very hard work, and so, if we watch, we see that as a bee grows tired her place is taken by a fresh worker, and so the ventilating is constantly kept up.
During the hot nights of summer, in the busiest time, the hive is thronged with workers who have come home from the fields to shelter from the dew and cold of the night. The city then becomes very crowded and hot, and a large army of bees must be kept at work ventilating. ”

“ The reason for filling the abode of the new community with frames of worker-brood, is to prevent the bees from building drone-comb, and raising males only, as they are apt to do when they have to manufacture a queen, at least till she is not only hatched but begins to lay eggs. ”

“ They usually deposit their eggs correctly in drone cells, though drone-breeding queens lay in those of workers and even in royal cells—thus evincing a presence of the will though an absence of the power. To get rid of a fertile worker it has been recommended by Mr. Rorl to "drive" the bees (Chap. V. § iv.) to an empty hive, and place this in a near spot; all will return to their old home except the one to be got rid of, she having probably never flown before, and therefore not knowing her way. ”

“ In the hive-bee and among ants, on the other hand, there are constant structural distinctions between queen and worker, and the function of the queen bee in a hive is confined to egg-laying, the labour of the community being entirely done by the workers. Many ants possess several different forms of worker, adapted for special duties. ”

“ Wildman tells of seeing the workers gathering pollen and honey the same day that they came forth from the cells. This idea is quickly disproved if we Italianize black-bees. We know that for some days these young bees do not leave the hive at all, except in case of swarming, when bees even too young to fly - 99 - will essay to go with the crowd. These young bees, like the young drones and queens, are much lighter for the first few days.
The worker-bees never attain a great age. ”

“ Meantime the other bees would be working themselves to death trying to fill the hive full of honey; for honey is what they give the little bees to eat as soon as they are born. And these worker bees, very staid, respectable, earnest bees, began to scowl at the conduct of this shirker of a sister they had.
You must know that, at the door of every beehive, there are always a number of bees on watch, to see that no insects but bees get into the hive. These policemen, as a rule, are old bees, with a great deal of experience in life. ”

“ They are so dead that the workers carry them out and put them all together with the dead ones.
“The next thing they do is for all the workers to get together and every big, bluffy drone that has been lazing round the hive and getting waited on by five or six worker bees and everybody has stood everything from him, why, every one of them gets stung, too. When it happens in the observation hive, you can sit with the glasses on ’em and see their faces, and they look so surprised and scared you can’t help feeling sorry for them. ”

“ The complex, the extraordinarily complex, behaviour of the worker-bees on any interpretation is still mysterious. This interpretation can be tested only by a reference to the life-history of other social-bees which have attained to a less complexity. This shows us that the sterile worker is not to be regarded as a newly-evolved type so much as an arrested stage of a more complete ancestral condition, and the fact that the worker is potentially a queen is further evidence of this. ”

“ Nimble, active, always at work, always singing over its work, the happiest of the working class, it keeps itself busy through all the season of flowers in gathering honey from their cups and carrying it to store away in its neat cells of wax. It is a winter store of food it is laying up. By good fortune the bees are able to collect more than they need for their own use, so their keepers can take part of it and still leave the little workers enough to live on the winter through.
The bee has been working in this way for man during long ages. ”

“ In the structure of the bee, and in all its stages of growth, [Pg 38] our parasite seems lower in the zoölogical scale than its host. It is structurally a degraded form of Working-bee, and its position socially is unenviable. It is lazy, not having the provident habits of the Working-bees; it aids not in the least, so far as we know, the cross-fertilization of plants—one great office in the economy of nature which most bees perform,—since it is not a pollen-gatherer, but on the contrary is seemingly a drag and hinderance to the course of nature. ”

“ Solitary insects may exhibit a single trait of superiority, either in the catching of their prey, as the spider does; or in the securing of a well protected habitation, as is instanced by the carpenter bee, the mason bee, and some other lone and non-associating insects: but the history of those which unite in societies unfolds more of insect energy and talent. In large communities a combination of exertions is requisite, to procure supplies for the general weal; an intercourse of mutual intelligence is kept up; labour is regularly divided ”