Читать книгу Beekeeping For Dummies - Howland Blackiston - Страница 51

In addition to laying eggs, the queen plays a vital role in maintaining the colony’s cohesiveness and stability. The mere presence of the queen in the hive motivates the productivity of the colony. Her importance to the hive is evident in the amount of attention paid to her by the worker bees everywhere she goes in the hive. But, as is true of every working mom or regal presence, she can’t be everywhere at once, and she doesn’t interact with every member of the colony every day. So how does the colony know it has a queen? By her scent. The queen produces a number of different pheromones (mentioned earlier in this chapter) that attract workers to her and stimulate brood-rearing, foraging, comb-building, and other activities. Also referred to as queen substances, these pheromones play an important role in controlling the behavior of the colony: Queen substance keeps the worker bees from making a new queen and inhibits the development of the worker bees’ ovaries, thus ensuring that the queen is the only egg-laying female in the hive. They act as a chemical communication that “all is well — the queen is in residence and hard at work.” As a queen ages, these pheromones diminish, and when that happens, the colony knows it’s time to supersede her with a new, young queen.

Pheromones are essential in controlling the colony’s well-being. This queen substance makes its way around the hive like a bucket brigade. The queen’s attendants pick up the scent from the queen and transfer it by contact with neighboring bees. They in turn pass the scent onto others, and so it distributes throughout the colony. So effective is this relay that if the queen were removed from the hive, the entire colony would be aware of her loss within an hour. When the workers sense the lack of a queen, they become listless, and their drive to be productive is lost. Without leadership, they nearly lose their reason for being! First they’re unhappy and mope around, but then it dawns on them: “Let’s make a new queen.”