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The real science · honeybee

A month to live, a colony to serve.

Honeybee workers look selfless, but the hive is policed for a reason.

A short life in stages

A summer worker honeybee lives roughly 2–5 weeks as an adult 1. She moves through jobs in a pretty reliable pattern. Young bees nurse brood and build comb deep in the interior, middle-aged bees guard and process food, the oldest bees forage2. The dangerous job is saved for last, when a worker has the least life left to lose, which is exactly the trade-off the game hands you each week.

Foraging

Foraging feeds the colony but kills the forager. Once a bee starts flying field trips she faces predators, weather, exhaustion, and even windshields. Marked-bee studies measured the mortality of foragers and found it strong enough that a forager's remaining life expectancy is only a few days3. Foragers rarely die in the hive, they simply fail to come home. In the game, every foraging trip adds 12% to your weekly death risk.

The temptation

Workers can lay unfertilized eggs that develop into males. Genetically, a worker is more related to her own sons (r = 0.5) than to the queen's sons, her brothers (r = 0.25), so from her genes' point of view, sneaking eggs into the comb beats raising the queen's. So why don't all of the workers just lay their own eggs?

The police

Because the queen mates with many males, the other workers are mostly half-sisters, and a half-sister's son (r ≈ 0.125) is worth less to them than the queen's son (r = 0.25). So workers stop each other from reproducing4. Ratnieks and Visscher showed that eggs laid by workers are found and eaten within a day (about 98% of them), while queen-laid eggs are left alone5. Because of this, a laid egg is worth 0.02 × 30 = 0.6 expected points vs. 3 for honest work.

The bees take a different route to cooperation than the vampire bats' reciprocity or the cleaner fish's reputation. Comparing them is exactly why the games exist. The question of how cooperation is stabilized runs through my own research too.

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References

  1. Winston, M.L. (1987). The Biology of the Honey Bee. Harvard University Press.
  2. Seeley, T.D. (1982). Adaptive significance of the age polyethism schedule in honeybee colonies. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 11, 287–293. doi:10.1007/BF00299306
  3. Visscher, P.K. & Dukas, R. (1997). Survivorship of foraging honey bees. Insectes Sociaux 44, 1–5. doi:10.1007/s000400050017
  4. Ratnieks, F.L.W. (1988). Reproductive harmony via mutual policing by workers in eusocial Hymenoptera. The American Naturalist 132, 217–236. doi:10.1086/284846
  5. Ratnieks, F.L.W. & Visscher, P.K. (1989). Worker policing in the honeybee. Nature 342, 796–797. doi:10.1038/342796a0