It’s safe to say most people have a love-hate relationship with bees. They’re so cute and fuzzy! They help flowers grow! Also, their stingers make them terrifying!
Here’s a phenomenon that you may not have known about. Recently, beekeeper Elisha Bixler (@howsyourdayhoney3) posted a TikTok video of “queen balling.”
In the video, a literal ball of bees rolls around Bixler’s hand, furiously beating their wings. Bixler explains that “queen balling” happens when a colony of bees decides to kill their own queen. This can happen if she’s failing to lay eggs, or if she’s an imposter queen from another hive. The bees kill her by overheating her with their bodies while biting and stinging her. Bixler describes it as “one of the most brutal things I have ever seen in the beekeeping world,” and slowly pries the ball apart to reveal the queen in the middle.
Despite the name, queen bees don’t actually rule over their hives. Instead, as the only member of the colony able to lay eggs, they spend most of their lives inside the hive, producing brood while the worker bees around them take care of larva, clean the hive, fight off intruders, and forage for pollen and nectar.
Here are some more fun, random facts about bees, since now you’ve got me going:
The vast majority of bees in a colony are female. Each colony contains only a handful of males, called drones, and the only purpose those males serve is impregnating a new queen. On their nuptial flight, during which drones chase the new queen through the air, the drone who’s lucky enough to fertilize her dies when his penis pops off in her body. Some sources report that a human standing nearby can actually hear the pop. I haven’t yet verified this myself.
Only older honeybees leave the colony to forage. The younger ones stay in the hive, tending brood, while their big sisters venture out into the world.
There are over 20,000 species of bees throughout the world, and most of them aren’t the honeybees most of us are familiar with. Many bees live solitary lives, building nests in crannies or burrows. Many others don’t even look like bees at first glance. Some are an iridescent green color, like flies, while others are as tiny as two millimeters long. Bumblebees are officially the bumbliest of all bees.
Bees truly don’t want to sting you. They really, truly don’t! Bees only sting when they or their hive are threatened. This is why beekeepers like Bixler can pick up bees with their bare hands (although Bixler admits that the bees started stinging her when she pried them off the disgraced queen).
If you see a swarm of bees, that might mean a colony has split in half and the offshoot is looking for a home. You can leave it bee (sorry) or you can call a beekeeper like Bixler to safely move the swarm. For that matter, a beekeeper can remove a colony that’s moved into your yard. You don’t have to have an exterminator kill the whole hive.
Finally, bees pollinate farmers’ crops and help the flowers in your garden grow! Plants and pollinators have co-evolved together for millions of years, so the next time you bite into a ripe piece of fruit, thank the bee who did the hard work of fertilizing it.
But if you’re a queen bee, just make sure you’re making that egg quota. Otherwise, your ass is grass.
(featured image: Pixabay via Pexels.com)
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