#11. You are what you eat - nurture trumps nature in a bee's world

Back to the saga of our queen and her subjects (see post #9).

After her final mating flight, the queen settles back into the hive to begin her life's mission - laying eggs and defending her throne against would-be usurpers.

The mated queen now carries a life-time supply of sperm in her abdomen, in an organ called the 'spermatheca'.  Because she has mated with a number of drones, the sperm will be genetically diverse.  Each time Her Highness lays an egg , it is first individually fertilized as it passes through the spermatheca.  Then the queen lowers her abdomen into the bottom of a high-sided, wax hexagonal cell, deposits a single egg, and moves on to the next cell to repeat the process.  She will go on to lay up to 2000 (or even more) every day for the rest of her life.  If the average queen lives 2 years (they can live up to 5, apparently), she may lay well over 1,500,000 eggs.

(Here's a fact that I have a hard time getting my head around:  besides laying fertilized eggs, which usually mature into workers, and very rarely into another queen (more on that later), the queen may choose to lay unfertilized eggs which are also viable.  These unfertilized eggs, which bypass the spermatheca, mature into drones, who are the only male bees in the colony.  So every male bee has a mother but no father.  Astounding.  In fact, if you notice an unusually large number of drones in a colony, it is a sign that the queen is at the end of her breeding life; laying a large number of unfertilized eggs probably means that the queen's spermatheca, her personal sperm bank, is running out of juice.)
  
A bee egg looks like a small white comma at the bottom of the cell and can be seen with the naked eye.  (We will be looking for these, along with other stages of brood, like larvae and capped brood, which is the last stage before the emergence as adult bees, each time we open our hives to examine them.  Seeing an abundance of bees in all stages of development will indicate that the colony is thriving.)  3 days after being laid, the eggs hatch.  Well, not 'hatch', exactly - the 'eggshell', actually a membrane, dissolves to reveal a tiny larval bee grub.  It is at this stage that the nurse bees really get busy.

The nurses start feeding the larvae with royal jelly, the amazing nutritionally-dense elixir that is exuded from the glands on their heads.  The bees fill the larval cells with the concoction and the tiny grubs actually float around in it.  After the third day, the diet is changed to less-rich nutrients.  The bees raised in this manner mature into worker bees if the eggs that produced them were fertilized, or drones, if the eggs were not.

And here's where it gets amazing - the worker bees may choose to continue to feed only royal jelly to one or more larvae, instead of switching to a less-rich diet.  And a bee grub that is fed only royal jelly will develop into a queen; the egg of a queen and the egg of a worker bee are identical in every respect.  The sole factor determining who becomes a worker and who becomes a queen is baby food; depriving larval bees of royal jelly stops their reproductive organs from fully developing.  So the worker bees, while genetically female, lack the full complement of hormones and pheromones that ultimately enable the queen to mate and produce fertilized eggs.  Additionally, a queen bee grows to be about 50% bigger than a worker, but matures much faster - 16 days from egg to queen, as opposed to 21 days from egg to worker, and, as has already been mentioned, lives many, many times longer than her sister worker.  And the queen can sting with impunity - she does not die after stinging, as the workers do.  In fact, should her workers form a coup to unseat her by raising new queens, the reigning monarch will try to sting to death any newly-emerging queens in order to protect her throne.  (The Borgias have nothing on these bugs!)  All these differences due to diet alone.

Meanwhile, back at the apiary-in-training...MY HIVES HAVE ARRIVED!  Five big boxes delivered by UPS a couple of days ago.  I put the boxes in the garage, and the next morning when I went in to unpack them, I was greeted by such a warm, sweet scent of honeyed beeswax wafting from the packages.  What a luscious aroma.  I will start assembling today, and maybe do some painting.

And the arrival of our bees has been delayed due to bad weather in the south.  (The bees are coming from a breeder in Georgia, and his bee yards are flooded.)  We were to have had a demonstration of installing bees into the hive yesterday, and were to have picked up our bees next week.  But, no bees:  no demo, no pick-up.  The demo is now scheduled for next Saturday, with the nuke pick-up on the following Friday or Saturday.  Great.  Easter weekend.  And I have a houseful of guests.  Oh, well, more people around to witness my first sting, I guess.