Are there lazy bees

Guard duty might be easier, but it is still a raw deal. A honeybee army has no veterans. So imagine your frustration when you notice the drones in the hive.

These male bees look impressive, weighing in at 1. Instead, they appear to just mooch off the hive while they come and go as they please. It would be tempting to kick the freeloaders out of the nest for which you work so hard to provide.

So why do honeybees tolerate these apparently lazy drones? This mystery plagued humans for millennia, and until it was solved, no one could make sense of where bees came from.

Despite thousands of years of study, the great mystery of honeybees was how they reproduced. As we often have to do, ancient people did the best they could to make sense of their world with the evidence with which they had to work. Aristotle wrote in his History of Animals that he thought drone bees, rather than nectar, were brought back to the hive from certain flowers. They believed that bees would spontaneously generate in the corpses of dead animals.

There are two major theories as to why this belief was perpetuated. The first is that in arid climates with few hollow trees, a desiccated corpse of something large like an ox would provide an adequate location for a new queen to set up a hive. An alternate explanation has to do with the drone fly Eristalis tenax.

For one hour, the researchers killed every bee that came to a feeder. Since they were out foraging, these bees were more likely to be the busy kind—so the researchers could assume that they'd disproportionately removed hard-working bees from the colonies.

For the rest of that day, each colony had barely any visits to the feeders. But the next morning, foraging returned to its usual levels. The slacker bees had stepped up. But they found that the other bees are able to work just as hard. As long there are enough busy bees, though, the rest will relax a little. So "as strategically lazy as a bee" might be a better simile. As long as entomologists are ruining things, maybe they'll learn next that bugs in a rug aren't really snug.

Image: top, Rebecca Leaman via Flickr ; bottom, Tenczar et al. Tenczar, P. Hutterites, too. Whenever I would stop by at the nearest Hutterite colony, I could always find someone with a bit of time for a relaxing visit and small glass of dandelion wine — even on mild, sunny afternoons. He mentions scientists having attached microchips to some bees and finding some made 10 foraging flights a day and some only 3. Old ways of thinking about things sometimes stay too long unquestioned….. Like Liked by 1 person.

Like Like. Perhaps like firefighters at the station or doctors on call. So well phrased, Emily! Mark Winston often talks about the relaxed work ethic of honey bees and suggests that we adapt their balance of work and rest. Good luck! I know that some bees probably do work harder than others. But I still believe there are more lazy beekeepers than lazy honey bees. I think Tom Sealy has down some experiments watching bees and they do indeed take rest time. I forget the numbers but it was higher than you might think.

Foragers go into a semi sleep state when they rest. Thanks, Erik. Bees might spend time goofing off. Makes them all the more endearing.

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When conditions are suitable the foragers fly hard, covering many miles to accumulate nectar, pollen, water, and propolis for the colony. At different times of the year, colony growth and contraction dynamics will be such that the number of bees available for particular tasks may exceed the number needed. Thus, some bees will be underutilized. Queen events or seasonal brood dynamics in the colony can lead to situations where there is an abundance of young bees but not a lot of brood to tend to.

Foragers work very hard when resources are abundant and weather conditions are favorable, but they essentially take cold, wet, and windy days off and are also largely idle overnight in the hive.