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A honeybee hive might seem like a peaceful utopia, but in reality, it's buzzing with internal conflict between warring factions. And the biggest conflict is between the queen and the worker bees. Hi, I'm Cameron, and this is MinuteEarth. There are three types of bees in a hive: the queen, who lays all the eggs, her daughters - the worker bees - and her sons - the drones. From the queen's perspective, both workers and drones are valuable. She needs daughters to run the hive, find food, nurse the larvae, and even feed her. But she also needs sons to pass along her genes by mating with other queens. So it makes sense for a queen bee to
lay as many eggs of both types - workers and drones - as she can. But the worker bees are the ones actually caring for those eggs, and their priorities are way different; they'd benefit from more sisters to share the workload. What's more, because of the weird way honeybee genetics works, which, by the way, we made a whole other video about already, workers share about 75% of their genes with each other, only 50% with the queen, and a mere 25% with the drones; in other words, it's genetically beneficial for workers to favor their sisters over their much more distantly-related brothers. So they preferentially feed female larvae, leaving male larvae to
beg for scraps - which aren't always enough to keep them alive. Sometimes, workers will even kill drone larvae to free up food and care for more workers. So even though the queen is in charge of producing offspring, the workers ultimately control the sex ratio of the hive, and they make sure that it's producing mostly females; as a result, honeybee workers can outnumber drones by a un-bee-lieveable ten to one. In other communal insects - like termites - where workers, soldiers and royalty can be male or female, workers don't give any preferential treatment; these species' sex ratios end up much more balanced. But honeybees' worker-queen conflict goes much deeper than just spoiling sisters.
Workers are also constantly keeping tabs on the queen's health, and as soon as her egg-laying slows down, they start feeding one of their baby sisters a special formula that triggers her ovaries to start developing - this makes her a potential new queen. In order to keep her crown, the old queen has to constantly find and kill these queens-to-be before they grow up. And if one does, two things can happen. The workers might gang up on the old queen and assassinate her -Julius Caesar style- or, the hive might fragment, with a ton of workers swearing fealty to their new sister-queen and flying off to start a new hive with her.
In either case, some, if not all, workers are supplanting their own mother with a sister they're more closely-related to, so that she can pass on their shared genes. But while things will be great for the new queen for a while, her daughters might eventually decide to get rid of her too. So while it might seem awesome to be the Queen Bee, the reality can really sting. Bees are awesome, but like many other important pollinators, they are rapidly disappearing. The good news is we can actually help: that's why we joined Planet Wild.
Every month, we, as a community, fund a mission to restore our planet. We love that they tackle problems with very specific goals and show the results on their Youtube channel. Like, how they helped save the habitat of Monarch butterflies in Mexico. If you want to make a difference in nature, consider joining us over at Planet Wild. You can give whatever amount you like and the first 100 people to sign up using our code MinuteEarth1 will get their first month paid for by us.
Just scan this QR code or click the link in the description. And there's no catch here - you can cancel anytime. If you want to see Planet Wild in action, check out their butterfly mission here.
