Bees communicate with each other using various methods:
- Movement: Bees use behaviors like the “waggle” dance to convey information about food sources and other colony matters.
- Odor cues: Bees release pheromones to communicate health, reproductive information, and more.
- Touch: Bees may touch antennae or engage in antennal brushing to convey messages.
- Acoustic signals: Bees use sounds like piping, tooting, and hissing.
- Trophallaxis: Bees transfer food and fluids from one mouth to another.
Pheromones.
Queen Pheromones
The queen bee is responsible for a colony’s main regulations and functions, mostly achieved through a complex blend of pheromones known collectively as the “queen signal.”
The queen can regulate her workers in several critical ways, both behaviorally and physiologically (bodily). Through chemical controls, she can establish the social hierarchy, maintain worker cohesion, allow kin to recognize each other, and stimulate cleaning, building, guarding, foraging, and brood feeding. Queen pheromones also call workers around her to groom and feed her.
Pheromones are what attract drones during mating flights. Mating appears to be a crucial factor in developing the queen’s chemical signal and its attractive effect on workers.
Pheromones also allow the queen to maintain her reproductive supremacy by inhibiting worker reproduction and suppressing queen-rearing by the workers. When the queen’s pheromones begin to decline (due to age or illness), the queen’s iron grip on the colony lessens, and the reduction in pheromones signals the workers to rear new queens.
Worker Pheromones
While the queen dominates the chemical realm in which bees live, workers don’t have specific methods of pheromone communication. Worker bees perform different tasks depending on their age. This is termed “temporal polyethism,” and it’s determined by the workers’ glandular plasticity (the ability of glands to alter and change with age and adapt to the colony’s changing needs). Such tasks as wax production (usually found in young bees) or colony defense (usually performed by older bees) are not rigid and can change in accordance with need.
Workers can regulate their own task allocation. When there are many foragers, their pheromones inhibit the development of younger bees, which then devote themselves to nest occupations. When the number of foraging bees declines, the inhibitions of the younger bees drop, and they develop into new foragers.