Not just any honey bee is allowed to hang around the hive. Honey bee colonies have their own bouncers who get to decide which bees get to hang out with the queen bee and which bees get kicked out of the hive.
There are three types of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in every colony with three different jobs. The colony’s lone queen bee lays the eggs. All of the male bees in the hive are drones – their main job is to mate with queen bees from other colonies. The female bees are the workers and are responsible for taking care of the bee larvae, building the hive and honeycomb, processing the honey, foraging for resources and one more role: deciding which drones from other hives are cool enough to hang out with their queen. If the ladies decide a bee is unworthy, they evict the unworthy suitor from the colony altogether. Drones also use up a lot more food than workers, so if the colony is low on resources, they only want the best of the best suitors in their hive.
Gilchrist, Nixon, Shultz, Ginzel, and Harpur, scientists at Purdue University, tested to see whether colonies would kick out smaller or sick drones, determining them unfit for their queen. To create some immune-challenged bees for their experiment, the researchers injected lipopolysaccharide into a group of treatment bees. The injection affects the bees’ immune system, causing a reaction that changes the bees’ smell so other bees think the treated bees are sick. They found that the worker bees were much more likely to kick out “sick” bees than a healthy bee. This also protects the hive from the spread of disease – worker bees, if they get sick, will leave the colony themselves just like how we stay home from school when we are feeling under the weather, yet drones don’t leave the colony of their own will. When scientists added immune-challenged bees to a colony without workers present, none of the drones were kicked out of the hive, regardless of their charisma level. This means it is entirely up to the female worker bees to escort the less attractive drone bees out of the hive!
Kicking out the smaller, weaker bees allows for the food to go to the stronger bigger bees, creating hope for the next generation of bees to also be big and strong while also protecting the hive from sickness. Next time you see bees buzzing around a hive, remember there is a mini dating show happening inside where the worker bees decide who goes home!
Works Cited
Gilchrist, I.R., Nixon, J.M., Shultz, R.R. et al. To house or oust: Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies can evaluate and evict drones of low quality. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 78, 47 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-024-03461-8
