Life in the Hive

Living in a hive, it's all about caste. You are either born well off, or you are not. I will explain the bee hive in detail.

Worker - The worker insect has several responsibilitys, creating the hive, nurturing the young, foraging for food. Workers are strile females.. always. Hives are a matriarch society completely.

Drones - The best life you could have, and then the sudden stop. The drone is a male Bee. He spends his time hanging about the Hive, watching the workers work, all you can eat honey, nailing the queen as much as possible. Until the end of breeding time. Then they are killed by the soilders or exiled from the hive. Where they will die anyways.

Soilders - The soilder caste is the killer. looks for enemy bees and destroys them.

Queen - Lays eggs. Commands the others via body movements. The queen emits a specific scent. To move a swarm of bees, one must only move the queen. The others will follow.

New Queens - When a princess is born, she must fight the queen. Winner gets the hive. If it is a draw, the loser of the split decision takes half the army and swarms. The swarm is a collection of displaced bees looking for a new place to nest.

Things you must know.

Bees behave according to scent in many cases. To walk amongst them one only needs to smell like them. I remember an experiment where they sprayed a moth with bee pheramones and sent it into the hive. The soilders allowed it to live. Be warned, the wrong scent will get you in serious trouble. Should you be given alarm scent, most often from a sting, it alerts the other bees that you are an asshole. Dead kinsmen also give off alarm scent.

Smoke freaks them out, it causes them to eat honey like mad and fall into a coma. This is when a beekeeper plunders the hive for honey.

Soapy water. It's like VX poison gas to a bee. A bee striken with soapy water cannot breathe. It will die from this.

I hope you've enjoyed my little piece on Bees I hope it gets you out of a crunch someday.