Honeybee Biology–Life of a Superorganism

 

The Bee Colony — Like a Mammal in Several Bodies

Characteristics leading to the dominance of mammals can be found in a similar constellation in the bee colony superorganism.

According to all the usual criteria, honeybees are insects—of that, there is no doubt. And this has been so since their appearance in their present form, about 30 million years ago. Nevertheless, in the 19th century they were accorded the “status” of vertebrates, following a remarkable comparison made by the apiarist and cabinet maker Johannes Mehring (1815–1878). According to Mehring, a bee colony is a single “being” equivalent to a vertebrate animal. The worker bees represent the body organs necessary for maintenance and digestion, while the queen and the drones represent the female and male genital organs.

The concept of equating an entire bee colony to a single animal resulted in the term “bien”, implying the “organic interpretation of an individual”. The honeybee colony was seen to be an indivisible whole, a single integrated living organism. On the basis of his work on ants, the American biologist William Morton Wheeler (1865–1937) coined the term “superorganism” in 1911 for this special type of living form (origin: lat: super=above; grk: organon=tool).

Here, I would like to take the shrewd and basic observation of the old apiarist’s concept of a bee colony to the extreme, and propose that a honeybee colony is equivalent not only to a vertebrate, but in fact to a mammal, because it possesses many of the characteristics of mammals. This may seem rather farfetched, but not if rather than concentrating on the phylogeny of the honeybee, one would focus on the context of those functional evolutionary characters that have rendered the most recently evolved form of all vertebrates—the mammals—dominant.

Using a distinct set of criteria and novel features, mammals can be separated from other vertebrates—and directly compared with honeybees:

Mammals have a very low rate of reproduction—so do honeybees.

Female mammals produce nourishment (milk) for their offspring in special glands—female honeybees also produce nourishment (royal jelly) for the offspring in special glands.

The uterus of mammals offers their developing offspring a precisely controlled and protective environment, independent of the control variables of the external world—honeybees provide the developing juvenile forms the same protection: the “social uterus” of the brood comb in the nest.

Mammals have body temperatures of about 36ºC—honeybees keep the temperature of the brood combs containing the pupae at about 35ºC.

Mammals with their large brains possess the highest learning and cognitive abilities of all vertebrates—honeybees possess a highly developed capacity for learning, and a cognitive ability that eclipses that of some vertebrates.

It is of considerable interest to biologists that this list of novel and fundamental developments characterizing mammals, ourselves included, is found also for a honeybee colony.

The notion of honeybee colonies as “honorary mammals”—or better expressed, as having developed the same novel strategies as mammals have—suggests that there is more to this than a mere superficial similarity. And this is indeed the case.

To extract more information about this phenomenon, i.e., to go beyond simply relating surprising analogies, it is necessary to question why these characters are shared. In this regard, I believe that it is helpful to look for significant “problems” for which animals have “found” the same solutions.

Initially, we could ask: “We can see the solution, what was the problem? We know the answer, what was the question?”

A group of organisms that undertake an evolutionary step forward can have an advantage over their competitors, depending on the extent to which their own existence is influenced by the random nature of the environment. Environmental factors vary unpredictably. Should these affect a broad palette of characters in a population, then these characters acquire a “value”, because they will determine the reproductive success of the population. The better adapted organisms flourish, the less well adapted vanish. This is the nub of Darwin’s theory on the mechanism of evolution.

Given the unpredictable direction or intensity of environmental change, an organism would therefore seem to be well advised to produce as many and varied progeny as possible, in order to prepare for many possible, unknown future scenarios.

When, through the course of evolutionary process, organisms adapt to, and can even control a significant number of environmental parameters, and thereby more or less free themselves from the dictates of the environment, they can afford to exploit this, and produce fewer progeny. Mammals and honeybees both belong to this special category of beings.

Independence from fluctuating sources of energy, and from a varying quality of nourishment through self-produced food, protection from enemies by the construction of shielded living space, and independence from the influence of weather by controlling the climate in the habitat—all are clear advantages over organisms to which such possibilities are not available.

All these “mammal-like” qualities guarantee mammals, as well as honeybees, a significant independence of prevailing environmental conditions. This is achieved through the existence of a complex social and behavioral organization enabling the effective application of available material and energy. A lower rate of reproduction can be adopted as a consequence of these optimally controlled living conditions. Organisms with low reproductive rates, and that are highly competitive, achieve a stable population size through the small number of progeny within a framework of possibilities offered by the habitat. Should the environmental conditions change, however, they would be poorly able to adapt, due to the limited number of offspring, unless they already have the critical environmental parameter under control by constructing a part of their own ecological niche for themselves to ensure their survival during difficult times.

As though not enough, honeybees go beyond the mere control of their environment: their colonies are, under optimal conditions, potentially immortal. The bee colony superorganism has found a way to continually alter its genetic equipment, like a “genomic chameleon”, so as not to enter an evolutionary dead end.

In general, control through feedbacks is indicative of living organisms. Each organism precisely controls its own “inner environment”. Through this process, energy flow, and the passage of material and information within an organism are adjusted to appropriate levels. Body temperature is the result of energy addition and subtraction, while body mass is the result of a balance between the addition and removal of material. In 1939 in his book “The wisdom of the body”, W.B. Cannon coined the term “homeostasis” to describe this regulation of body state. Physiology is the realm of biology concerned with investigating these kinds of regulated processes in organisms. Transposed to an analysis of the controlled conditions within a honeybee colony as superorganism, or “ a mammal in many parts”, sociophysiology is concerned with which regulatory quantities in a honeybee colony are adjusted homeostatically, how these are carried out by the bees, and the purpose this all serves.

The physiology of mammals, and the sociophysiology of honeybees have arrived at remarkably similar interpretations. Comparable life strategies, evolved independently in different groups of organisms, are described to be analogous or convergent. The wings of a bird and those of insects are an example of such an analogy. The common problem, for which the invention of wings represents a solution, is “movement through air”.

Given the common features shared by mammals and honeybees, we are led to ask: “What was the common problem to be solved by this collection of convergent strategies?”. It is apparent that all these features allow mammals and honeybees a degree of independence from the environment, achieved by hardly any other groups of organisms. This independence does not necessarily extend over the entire lifespan of each individual, but rather is limited to particularly vulnerable stages in the life cycle of the organism.

Honeybee colonies employ strategies remarkably similar to those of mammals, and raise relatively few, but extremely well-prepared and carefully protected reproductive individuals to release into the world. To this end, honeybees have developed specific abilities and behaviors that belong among the most amazing in the living world. We are only just beginning to understand this highly complex tapestry.

Honeybee characteristics:

- The biology of the honeybee is constructed around using energy and material from the environment, and organizing these to ensure the propagation of daughter colonies of the highest quality. This insight is the key to understanding the amazing achievement and performance of honeybees.

- Although a relatively species-poor group of animals, honeybees exert an extensive influence on the biotope.

- The visual and olfactory world of bees, their ability to orient in space, and a greater part of their communication revolve around their relationship with flowering plants.

A honeybee forager visits a flower to collect nectar and pollen

- We still are guessing more than we know about sex in the private life of honeybees.

- The larvae of honeybees obtain their nourishment from a glandular secretion of adult bees, the function of which is comparable with the mother milk of mammals.

- Properties of the comb are integral components of the superorganism that contribute to the sociophysiology of the bee colony.

The comb emerges from actions and interactions of the builder bees.

- The close family relationships in a beehive are a result, not the reason, for their formation of a colony.

- The bee colony superorganism is more than the simple sum of all its parts. It possesses properties that one does not find in single bees, although many of the properties of single bees determine and influence those of the entire colony, within the framework of its sociophysiology.

Learn more about honeybees and the BEEgroup: http://www.beegroup.de/