Ok, well maybe not zombie hunters but at least they could be under the right circumstances. I just read an interesting article in Bee Culture about the caste structure within a honeybee hive. All beekeepers know there are three primary castes of honeybees in the hive. The queen at the top, followed by the workers, and lastly the slacker group we all know as the Drones.
Oh Noo! Zombeeeees!
Just as a refresher for those not in the know. The drones are the male honeybees in the hive. Their sole purpose is to find themselves a queen and then have their genitalia explode from their body during copulation with them. If they are lucky that is how they will die. Usually drones will either be killed while flying about searching for a soul mate or when they are thrown out of their hive to starve by the workers honeybees come the end of the season. So if the drone is lucky he can have one last hurrah before he moves on to Fiddler’s Green.
The workers and Queen of course are female and do all of the heavy lifting while in the hive the Drones sit back and chug honey in their loungers all day. But within the worker caste there are several sub castes. And these sub castes are primarily determined by the age of the bee. So when a worker bee emerges from the comb she will typically begin house keeping activities within the hive. Including being a nursemaid, construction worker, guard, and most interestingly an undertaker. After about 21 days of this type of activity they will graduate into the Honeybee Air Patrol and begin gathering resources outside of the hive in the form of nectar, pollen, water, and propolis.
The undertaker behavior is simply the process of removing dead honeybees from the hive. What is interesting about the undertaker caste is that there are two types. The first variety are only intermittent undertakers. If they arrive upon a corpse within the hive they will be less than likely to do something about it and move along following their other housekeeping duties. Sort of like the New York city bystander who notices someone on fire running down the street and then checks his watch to see if he is late for a meeting. If the normal worker does arrive upon a corpse and does take action it will only occur for a brief span of time. They may only move the dead bee a few inches from its current location. Comparable to the NYC bystander calling the Fire Department and then continuing down the sidewalk.
The second variety seem to be solely focused on the undertaking activity as they arrive upon the bee corpse. They will spend most of their pre-foraging activities undertaking rather than any of the other housekeeping activities. This undertaker class is comparable to the Guard class of honeybees. Only a small percentage of the worker population will fall in either of theses two castes. Researchers have hypothesized that the undertakers and guard bees are actually more advanced than the normal population in that they graduate to the Honeybee Air Patrol faster than the rest of the worker bee population.
This undertaker activity also seems to be initiated via chemical response from the release of oleic acid by the decaying corpse. Researchers, Gould and Gould (1988), applied this acid to the bodies of live bees and the undertaker class actively hunted them down to be thrown out the door. They could not differentiate between live and dead honeybees. It was the chemical emitting from their body that began the corpse removal process. To the undertakers, they basically saw a walking corpse and took action to remove the offending undead. Once the acid had evaporated, the former “undead” were allowed back in by the undertakers.
In the end who likes zombie’s. We don’t and neither do honeybees.
For more detailed information please read the current issue of Bee Culture. Pages 13-14, September 2009.
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