Why Hives Turn Against Their Queens

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A honey-beehive might seem like a peaceful utopia, but in reality it's buzzing with internal

conflict between war and 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 on 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 larva, 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 benefit from more sisters to share that workload.

What's more, because of the weird way honey bee 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 larva, 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, honey bee workers can outnumber drones by an unbelievable 10 to 1.

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 honey bee's 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, Julia Caesar style, or

the hive might fragment with a ton of workers swearing fieldy 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.