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Ants and bees are nature's team to ensure that fruit plants reproduce.
- Ants aerate the soil so that the seeds of fruit can take root and grow.
- Bees work in the air to fertilize flowers by pollinating them so that fruit holding the seeds can form.
Like with man, the ant's and the bee's success to thrive in so many environments has been attributed to their social organization. The ants are able to modify habitats and to exploit resources including crops and buildings of man. This places them into direct conflict with humans who also thrive by exploiting their environment. The bees, man's supplier of honey, also serve man as the main pollinators of the crops he farms.
Ants and bees evolved around 120 million years ago to give rise to flowering plants. They form colonies that range in size from a few dozen individuals to highly organized colonies which may occupy large territories and consist of tens of thousands of bees or millions of ants.
A colony consists of a female queen who is the mother. Her daughters are the workers and her sons are the drones. Ant and bee colonies are societies that have division of labor, communication between individuals, and an ability to solve complex problems that endanger the mother queen or her colony.
Ants communicate using a trail of scent they leave behind on the ground.
The queen of the colony lays her eggs. Using sperms she collected from her nuptial flight as a virgin queen, she fertilizes some of her eggs. Unfertilized eggs develop into sperm producing male drones. They are clones having only one copy of their chromosomes coming from the queen. They stay in the nest and are fed by the female workers and produce sperm and develop wings.
Fertilized eggs become her daughter workers. They have 2 copies of each of their chromosomes, one from the queen mother and the other from a male, making them sisters and step sisters. Like Cinderellas, they are destined to be workers with the possibility of becoming virgin queens, depending on the care they received from their sisters. They spend the first few days of their adult lives caring for their mother queen and their young brothers and sisters, teaching them various skills like building, maintaining and defending their nest. Females who are fed "royal jelly" stay in the nest to produce eggs and develop wings to become virgin queens. They eventually fly away and collect sperm from the males of neighboring families and find a new place to form a new colony.
When the queen of the colony dies or the colony gets too big, some of the virgin queens leave the nest with a swarm of workers to find and to found a new colony at a new site.
When the queen of the colony dies or the colony gets too big, some of the females are selectively turned into queens by workers. Colonies with multiple queens sometimes split with one of the queens leaving the nest with a swarm of workers to find and to found a new colony at a new site.
Nuptial flight
Males and virgin queens are single-purpose sex machines. They stay in their home colony and do nothing else than eat and be taken care of by their hard working sisters until conditions are right for the nuptial flight. For ants it is about 9 weeks after hatching from their eggs. For bees, about 3 weeks. The flight requires clear weather since rain is disruptive for flying. Different colonies of the same species often use environmental cues to synchronize the release of males and virgin queens so that they can mate with individuals from other nests, thus avoiding inbreeding. The actual "take off" from the colonies are also often synchronized as a protective measure to overwhelm predators.
The males take flight before the virgin queens and fly to the mating ground like a pine tree pre-selected by the workers of the neighboring colonies. The virgin queens follow the scent of pheromone left behind by the horny males. When all are there, the queens release pheromones to attract the males teasingly fleeing from them allowing only the fastest and the fittest males to mate. Mating takes place during flight.
One virgin queen will usually mate with several males storing enough sperm in her abdomen to last a lifetime during which time the sperm can be used to fertilize tens of millions of eggs. The males are built for the only purpose of inseminating the virgin queens, and can't even feed themselves. During the quick and violent mating, the male literally explodes his internal genitalia into the genital chamber of the virgin queen and quickly dies.
The satisfied females then seek a suitable place to begin a colony and begin to lay and selectively fertilize their eggs with the sperm they collected during their nuptial flight.
Bees produce many other products that are beneficial to man other than honey and bees wax. Royal jelly, a secretion from daughter worker bees, is used to feed the mother queen and the larvae destined to be virgin queens.
Propolis is a resinous mixture that bees collect from tree buds and sap flows. It is used as a sealant for unwanted open spaces in the hive. Propolis is used for small gaps while larger spaces are usually filled with beeswax. When a small animal finds its way into the hive and dies there and if the bees are unable to carry it out, they seal the carcass in propolis, essentially mummifying it and making it odorless and harmless.
While ants are thin and smooth like the rocks, bees are round and fuzzy like flowers. Bees have electrostatic charges which hold pollen, the sperm of plants. Bees fly more like helicopters than like planes or birds or other flying insects. They flap their wings almost 250 times per second. All that fast flapping appears not to be so healthy. Bee colonies do not last so long. The workers live a few weeks or months and the queen lives 3 to 4 years. Drones usually die upon mating or are expelled from the hive before the winter.
Ant colonies on the other hand can be long-lived. Although drones survive only long enough to mate and workers live only 1-3 years, the queen can live for up to 30 years.
Ant and bee colonies are single mother families with the queen being the mother. She lays eggs and fertilizes most of them with the sperms she collected on her one and only nuptial flight. The few unfertilized eggs develop as sperm producing sons and the fertilized eggs are born as her daughters. Her sons stay indoors and are taken care of by their sisters while they produce and store their sperm for dispersal during their one and only nuptial flight. Her daughters grow up to be just workers with the very slim chance that a few specially selected and fed ones become egg producing future queens.
The colonies are sometimes regarded as super organisms because the insects operate as a unified entity, collectively working together to support the colony in the same way the amoebas do in slime- molds. In this way, each bee or ant can be seen as a specialized cell of an organism and the colony can be looked on as the organism.
From even a higher level, the colony can be regarded as a society with individual ants and bees as specialized members of the society.
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