University of North Carolina biology student Andrew Pierce has just discovered something previously unknown about the behaviour of the European honeybee — “perhaps the most studied and economically important insect on Earth.”

It seems that the queen bee is not, after all, the absolute ruler of the hive.

“Major colony activities are initiated by the cumulative group actions of the colony’s older workers, not by the queen’s individual decision,” Pierce’s research shows. It is the older workers that signal to the queen and to the rest of the colony that it’s time to swarm. Inside the swarm cluster itself, workers make the “piping” noise that we normally associate with queens in competition with each other, telling the queen to fly.

“Researchers have never reported worker piping being done on the queen before, so some of what we found was exciting,” Pierce said. “It was generally surprising to see the level of interaction that the older bees have with the queen. This doesn’t normally happen in the hive.”

But this doesn’t mean that there’s a group of experienced bees who control the actions of the hive. Because bees have such short life spans and tiny brains, they aren’t capable of “managing the colony the way a human village might be managed by a council of elders.” Instead, it appears that the dynamics of the group itself — complex social interactions, environmental pressures or group dynamics — are “in some still-unknown way” the driving force behind all the complex group activities that honeybees undertake.

See also:
UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Publishes Significant Finding on Honeybee Societies: Older worker bees– not queen – inititate action, make decisions 11 June 2007