Beekeeper’s Notes February 2018: All For One And One For All

Published on: 1 Feb, 2018
Updated on: 1 Feb, 2018

Hugh Coakley keeps bees in Worplesdon. He talks about the lack of ego-trips in a hive.

It’s been nice and cold over the last few weeks so the bees are continuing to huddle close together to keep warm, only coming out when it’s a bit warmer but generally bonded into a social cluster. They move as one around the hive to feed on their honey stores.

The beekeeper has opened up the hive to reveal a large winter cluster of bees (from the Fitzgeralds Family Farm blogspot). The colder it gets, the tighter the cluster.

An interesting thing at this time of year is knowing that the whole hive is depending on each other and very obviously acting as one. As a tight cluster keeping warm, it is evidently working as a single entity.

Of course, they work together for the colony in the rest of the year as well. It is just not quite as noticeable. Bees come and go from the hive and there is busy activity inside and out. It could be all the bees are just looking after themselves but that is not the case.

Like a human body, the colony as a whole performs all of the basic functions to support life and keep their genes going. Sometimes called a superorganism, it acts as an integrated being.

The various individuals perform different roles, all essential  but which may not be to the immediate advantage of the individual bee but necessary for the colony.

Eating and digesting food, ensuring all parts of the body are fed and maintained, regulating temperature, procreating, dragging out the dead, collectively deciding on how the body will act, defending from aggressors and so on.

Like single cells in a human brain, the individual bees are ineffective alone but clever and very powerful acting together. As such, they don’t operate as individuals but as one group with a single objective.

If you asked a bee what it planned for this week, or God forbid, what was on its bucket list, it wouldn’t be agonising over its choices. Without thinking (and I wonder how much of that is going on in such a tiny brain), it may possibly raise a tiny quizzical antennae and say: “What does ‘a week’ mean?”

There is no room for individual thought in a hive and no ego-trips in a bee colony. They work together or die.

Infrared photo of a hive in winter. The bright yellow indicates the warmest part or the centre of the cluster. Away from the centre the colour darkens, as the temperature is lower. (Source; The Magazine of American Beekeeping).

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