I am now going to discuss a subject that often gives rise to sniggers and giggles - SEX.

So, here we go -

A newly born virgin queen will go out of the hive just once in her life for the single purpose of mating.  After that she will spend the rest of her life, anything between 2 - 5 years laying eggs, thousands and thousands and thousands of eggs. Fertilized eggs hatch into female worker bees, unfertilized eggs hatch into male drone bees.

How does it happen - remember I said that bees mainly operate via smell or to give its technical term, pheromones.  The queen bee gives off a particular pheromone, the entire colony knows exactly what is going on within the darkness of the hive through the production of pheromones.  A virgin queen (not Elizabeth I but an unmated queen), will be pushed out of the hive by the workers and sent off into the skies to find a bunch of avid drones together with an entourage of worker bees - their job is to ensure that she gets to the mating ground in the sky and back home without getting lost.

Drones from different colonies fly high up in the air waiting to mate. When a virgin queen flaps past a bunch of males they will take it in turns to mate with her.  Sadly for them, that presages the end of their lives.  On penetration the drones penis snaps off (and it is kind of funny to imagine a bee penis I must admit) and a huge amount of sperm pumps into her.  Amazingly, the queen will repeat this process about 12 times until she is full to the brim with sperm from 12 different drones, probably from 12 different colonies - thus ensuring a good cross section of gene pools.

Then the clever queen returns to her hive and starts laying into each cell matching up one sperm with one egg - bingo, fertilization has taken place. Queenie is manipulated around the cells by the worker bees, she does absolutely nothing but lay eggs for years and years. Extraordinary!

When Queenie finally dies the colony will become aware that there is an absence of queen like pheromone and the workers will know that she must be replaced. However, healthy colonies will never be left without a laying queen.   How does that work?

This Super Organism is wonderously smart - As the hive gets fuller and fuller of honey and brood cells - these are the cells that are housing the larval stages of the baby bees, the workers know that they need to split the colony into two.

They start constructing special queen cells or cups.  These are bigger than the regular cells and are oriented vertically rather than horizontally.  Queenie starts laying into the queen cups and these larva are fed a slightly different mix of food that stimulates the development of virgin queens. At that point the reigning queen will be gathered up by a retinue of workers and a few drones and they swarm off to find pastures new.

I think that one of our jobs as bee enthusiasts is to dispel the notion that swarms are scary.  They are not at all.  In fact, quite the opposite.  They do not have any honey with them, they do not have any brood (babies) so they have nothing to be defensive about, they are too busy looking for a new home in which to settle to bother about stinging. Watching a swarm is one of the most compelling sights in nature.  Check it out on YouTube. 

So, this is how a colony The old queen sets up a new home with her entourage of experienced workers and continues laying.

extends its collective life - back at the original home new virgin queens hatch out, the strongest amongst them kills off the pretenders to the throne and then goes out to find some attractive drones and continues the life cycle of the colony.

Now, I have just discovered that there are radically differing attitudes to swarming among beekeepers.  I will discuss this later.  Suffice to say, it transpires that just as there are many different rabbinical interpretations of how to be a good Jew, there are lots of different approaches to keeping bees. It seems that there is also quite a lot of hostility between the different exponents of beekeeping.

This has been quite a revelation to me - I shall enlighten you in subsequent episodes - stay tuned for more remarkable facts from bee world.