Why Hives Turn Against Their Queens

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1:00True Spies from Spiescape Studios, wherever you get your podcasts. A honeybee hive might seem like a peaceful utopia, but in reality it's buzzing with internal conflict between warring factions, and the biggest conflict is between the queen and the worker bees. Hi, I'm Cameron and this is MinuteEarth. There are three types of bees on a hive. The queen who lays all the eggs, her daughters, the worker bees, and her sons, the drones. From the queen's perspective, both workers and drones are valuable. She needs daughters to run the hive, find food, nurse the larva, and even feed her. But she also needs sons to pass along her genes by mating with other queens. So it makes sense for a queen bee to lay as many eggs of both types, workers, and drones as she can. But the worker bees are the ones actually caring for those eggs, and their priorities are way different. They benefit from more sisters to share that workload. What's more, because of the weird way honeybee genetics works, which by the way we made a whole other video about already, workers share about 75% of their genes with each other,

2:05only 50% with the queen, and a mere 25% with the drones. In other words, it's genetically beneficial for workers to favor their sisters over their much more distantly related brothers. So they preferentially feed female larva, leaving male larva to beg for scraps, which aren't always enough to keep them alive. Sometimes workers will even kill drone larva to free up food and care for more workers. So even though the queen is in charge of producing offspring, the workers ultimately control the sex ratio of the hive, and they make sure that it's producing mostly females. As a result, honeybee workers can outnumber drones by an unbelievable 10 to 1. In other communal insects, like termites where workers, soldiers, and royalty can be male or female, workers don't give any preferential treatment. These species' sex ratios end up much more balanced. But honeybee's worker queen conflict goes much deeper than just spoiling sisters. Workers are also constantly keeping tabs on the queen's health, and as soon as her egg laying slows down, they start feeding one of their baby sisters a special formula that

3:07triggers her ovaries to start developing. This makes her a potential new queen. In order to keep her crown, the old queen has to constantly find and kill these queens to be before they grow up, and if one does, two things can happen. The workers might gang up on the old queen and assassinate her, Julia Caesar style, or the hive might fragment with a ton of workers swearing fieldy to their new sister queen and flying off to start a new hive with her. In either case, some, if not all, workers are supplanting their own mother with a sister they're more closely related to, so that she can pass on their shared genes. But while things will be great for the new queen for a while, her daughters might eventually decide to get rid of her too. And while it might seem awesome to be the queen bee, the reality can really sting.