What determines if a queen bee produces another queen bee or just drone/worker bees? When a queen produces a queen, is there some kind of turf war until one of them leaves?
In: Biology
Fun fact about bees..they’re a perfect democracy.
They vote for the best place to swarm to by scouting the neighborhood. A bee finds a candidate location and flies back to the hive. Starts dancing to indicate where to find the new location. How long the bee keeps dancing is an indicator of how good a location the bee thinks it has found.
While it’s carrying on about “hey guys, check out this spot…it’s really great..” other bees fly off to check the spot. They come back and do the dance as well. Again, they’re voting on how strongly they feel about the new digs by how long they keep the dance going. If it’s a really great spot, the returning bees get back in time to join the original dancer and so pretty soon you have a mosh pit of bees all dancing the same. A lousy spot doesn’t get enough bees all dancing at the same time because the earlier bees have peeled off and are out checking other locations that other scouts have found.
When enough bees are dancing the same song, they fly off and establish the new site.
The thing is, a bee has to check out the digs to dance the dance. You don’t get bee parties trying to sway the vote. Each bee has seen the spot they’re voting for and dances accordingly.
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