In a honey bee hive, the worker bees are all female, and as the name suggests, they do pretty much all the work, including fetching food, feeding the queen, cleaning up, defending the hive etc.
But why is this the case?
When a new queen is chosen, she goes on a quest to find romance and leaves the hive to find a suitable king. However, as male bees only live for a few weeks, there isn’t really time for a long courtship, so the queen adopts more of a “love the ones you’re with” approach and mates with the first 10 to 15 males she finds. Unfortunately for the successful males, mating results in their immediate death, while the queen returns to the hive and spends the next few years laying around 1500 eggs a day.
You might expect the genes of her children to be 50% hers and 50% one of her mates, but it’s not that simple. While female offspring share 50:50 genes with their mother and father, male offspring have 100% of their mother’s genes, so they are more like a sort of male clone of their mother. Biologically speaking, they are the very definition of Mummy’s boys.
The female worker bees don’t reproduce, so their only chance of passing on their genes is indirectly through either the genes of their brothers, or if one of their sisters is born a princess and goes on to become a Queen.
This means the best chance for a female worker bee’s genes to survive, is to help her brothers and sisters survive, and for this reason she is motivated to help out wherever she can and so she ends up doing all the work.
But for a male bee, the best chance for his genes to survive, is to mate with a passing new queen from another hive. And so they spend their short lives focusing on themselves and making sure they always look their best, just in case a new queen passes by.
So this means if a hornet attacks the hive, then a female worker bee will happily sacrifice herself in order to protect her genes, and for exactly the same reason, a male bee will happily sit back and sacrifice his sisters, as its all about genetics.
In fact male bees haven’t even bothered to evolve a sting. That’s not to say male bees are completely defenceless, as apparently if sufficiently annoyed they can deliver a pretty aggressive bite, although to be fair this might have been more effective if they had bothered to evolve some teeth, but its nice that they are making an effort.
