I was wondering if bees move eggs or lavae to diffrent cells if needed, like ants move eggs to other parts of the nest.
I cant find documentation on this so i assume they don't.
I was wondering if bees move eggs or lavae to diffrent cells if needed, like ants move eggs to other parts of the nest.
I cant find documentation on this so i assume they don't.
The bees move their eggs or larvae from one area of the frame to an other. They move them even in other frames. I've seen it a week ago when i split a hive. In the queenless hive i had 5 frames of capped larvae and eggs and two frames of honey and pollen. I found queen cells in the honey frames.
I've never seen them do it, and I have an observation hive and watch them alot, but I think they do sometimes. I'm not sure, but when they have a queen cup with no egg and the queen goes missing an egg seems to appear. Maybe I just don't see them before. On the other hand they often just clean out the duplicate eggs from a worker cell that has a drone egg or eggs in it rather than move it.
I have never read or seen it either. But I would be amazed with everthing else that bees do if they couldn't do that.
Obviously bees don't do it on the scale that ants do. You see ants pick up the whole brood nest worth of brood and leave. I don't watch ants nearly as much as I watch bees and I've seen ants do it a lot. I've never actually seen the bees do it, just seen the evidence that they did.
I think it's more of a case of Ants are in a position to have to be ready to pick-up and move in a hurry. Humans aren't the only reason their homes get disturbed. Since Bee brood depend upon comb, theoretically they could be in a position where there is nowhere to move the brood to. Ants on the other hand scoop up the eggs right quick and lay them down somewhere else.
I use to fret when I displaced ants, but if you stand back far enough where they won't come after you, you will see they quickly move camp and carry on with life.
Hmm so if bees move eggs, assuming the queen dies would they move an egg into a queen cell or would they just build a queen cell over a normal cell with an egg in it?
It depends. I've seen them do both.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks