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FEATURE

The Swarm Part 4 of 4

By Allen Cosnow, DVM

have left the original hive, nearly deprived of chews a hole in it, plunges in her stinger, and murders her sleeping
We adults, nearly defenseless. A person observing sister. In a honey bee colony there is room for one queen, one only,
this hive during the first days after the swarm has
and the first one to emerge wins.
left would think that it is empty, or that the The virgin remains in the hive to rest and gain strength for a few
colony is nearly dead. Instead of the copious stream of workers days. Then on the first suitable day, the all-important event occurs:
that until recently was rushing in and out, all that can be seen now the mating flight. A queen bee mates only once in her life, storing
are one or two bees that come out sporadically, fly around a bit, and the semen in an internal sac and keeping the spermatozoa alive for
then return. Hardly any of the more mature workers--those whose as long as three years. but she doesn't copulate inside the hive. In
task was to collect pollen and nectar and to guard the entrance-- fact, when the virgin is inside, the drones, the males, seem not to
have remained. All the others have flown away with the swarm. notice her, even if they are right next to her. To be fertilized, a virgin
However, there are still thousands of larvae and pupae inside, must leave the hive and fly high in the air, higher than bees normally
silently developing in their wax cells, almost all workers, but some fly on their working flights, often at a considerable distance from
new drones too. (The adult workers that remained behind were the the hive, even at the risk of losing her way back or being eaten by a
youngest ones, whose task in any case is to be the nurses, feeding bird. This serves to increase the probability that she will mate with
the larvae and covering the brood-containing combs to keep them drones from other colonies, lessening the possibility that she could
warm; this they continue to do.) Every day a thousand or more new mate with drones from her own colony, who are her brothers, thus
workers complete their metamorphosis and emerge from their cells. avoiding inbreeding.
In a short time, those remaining workers that had at first been High in the air and far from the hive, a large number of drones
nurses for the larvae are mature enough to go out to work on flow- – from wherever they originated – detect her presence and pursue
ers or to stand guard, while the newly-emerged workers take over her. As each of the fastest drones catches up to her he everts his
the care of their younger siblings still developing in their cells. sexual organ, and in an instant the copulation is done; the force of
but those are all of the previous generation, the last daughters the act tears away the organ, and the “successful” drone falls to
of their mother, the old queen, who has already begun a new life earth dead. A number of drones copulate with her on that flight,
elsewhere. There can be no new eggs; worker bees are female, but each contributing his genes and losing his life.*
sterile. The future of the colony resides entirely in that queen pupa After that busy few hours she returns to the hive. The workers greet
still in her cocoon inside the sealed cell where she is undergoing her her and clean her and feed her. Now there is once again a fertile queen
metamorphosis. Without her there can be no new generation, and who will lay eggs and be the mother of the colony. Once she has
the colony will die out. It is for this reason that bees never swarm made her mating flight, she will not leave the hive again, unless in the
until there is at least one sealed queen cell. future she herself takes part in a swarm as her mother did.
Thus, not more than nine days after the swarm has departed, the * The first description in English of honey bee mating was writ-
virgin queen is fully developed. She chews a hole in her cocoon ten in 1853 by the American l.l. langstroth in his book The Hive
and then chews an opening in the wax seal of her cell, often while and the Honeybee. I have always found it rather quaint that although
the nurse workers help her, chewing from the outside. When she he wrote the book in English, he cautiously wrote the paragraphs
emerges, the nurse bees surround her, cleaning her and feeding her that deal with the copulation in latin, so as not to offend the sen-
honey and pollen. sitivities of the victorian public.
but the “princess” doesn't have time to enjoy all this attention.
She has a certain pressing task to attend to: ridding herself of rivals. Allen Cosnow, DVM, is a retired small animal veterinarian who keeps his
She goes through every part of the hive in search of other queen several bee colonies on a city lot in Glencoe, Ill., a lakeshore suburb of Chicago.
cells (often there is at least one other), and when she finds one, she He is a veterinary school classmate of Fred H. Olin, DVM, MD.

42 San Antonio Medicine • December 2018