Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Why bees behave differently

I always wondered what happened when you made a nuc...

If you remove young bees from a hive for example by relocating one or more frames of bees to a nuc box, the older bees on those frames will fly back to their original home, the donor hive.  So, you would therefore expect to have a surplus of older foraging bees in the donor hive.  I always assumed that some of these older bees went off and did some other jobs for a bit; at least until there were more new bees.  But I didn't know what actually happened. It appears it's all to do with patterns of chemicals that latch on to and regulate certain genes in the bees brains...

So here we have the answer!

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