Earlier this week I found myself watching in awe as bumblebee was moving from flower to flower feeding on the sweet nectar of each floral arrangement. At the time, I didn’t put too much thought into it but as the week went on I realized that the bumblebee is a magnificent and complex insect. This line of thinking has brought me to the Cuckoo Bumblebee which is even more complicated than your average run of the mill bee. For starters the Cuckoo Bumblebee doesn’t help out with the pollen collecting duties, mainly because they don’t have the parts necessary to carry this tasty food of many bees. So what do they bring to the hive?
Destruction and Chaos
That’s right, instead of helping out members of the hive this parasitic insect prefers to take them down from the inside. A female Cuckoo Bumblebee will spend a small portion of her life looking for the perfect hive to call home. Once the target is acquired, the female Cuckoo Bumblebee will enter the hive and strategically sting the current Queen to death. With the royalty out of the way, the new queen will use pheromones and aggressive attacking behaviour to enslave the worker bees. They will be at her mercy with their sole purpose focused on feeding the dictator and her offspring. Once the Cuckoo Bumblebee babies have grown up, they will leave the hive in search of another place to call home.
An Impostor is Among Us
In some cases the hostile takeover isn’t nearly as dramatic as the female Cuckoo Bumblebee will simply fly into the hive and hide out for a few days, where she will eventually be accepted as one of them. At this point she will lay her eggs and watch her offspring grow up into terrorists. You may think that this method is much more civil and less destructive and while you are probably right, this behaviour will also spell doom for the hive in the long term. Since the Cuckoo Bumblebee can’t collect pollen (since they are missing a pollen basket…insert your joke here) her entire family will utilize the resources of the hive without contributing. Eventually, resources will run low and the hive will perish. So take your pick – a life of slavery or a slow and painful (but oblivious) death?
