Forager

Definition

Foraging is the final job in a worker's sequence, taken up at around three weeks old when her wax and brood-food glands have atrophied. It is the most dangerous task, which is why colonies assign it to their oldest bees. A forager may fly several kilometres a day and lives two to three weeks in the role.

Guide records that discuss this

• How bees navigateA forager may fly several kilometres to a flower patch and return to a hive entrance a few centimetres wide. She does it with a sun compass, a polarised-light backup, a memorised landscape and an internal odometer.
• How bees collect and process nectarA forager carries nectar in a stomach she does not digest from, hands it to a receiver who begins altering it chemically, and the colony then removes most of its water. The honey is made by the hive, not by the forager.
• How bees regulate hive temperatureA honey bee colony holds its brood nest between 34 and 35 °C year-round, in climates ranging from Siberian winter to Australian summer. It does this with shivering, fanning and evaporative cooling, and the precision matters.

Question records that discuss this

• Why do bees dance?To give directions. A returning honey bee forager performs a figure-of-eight run on the vertical comb in which the angle of the straight portion encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun, and its duration encodes the distance. Von Frisch called it a dance language, and the encoding is genuinely symbolic — a solar bearing represented as an angle from vertical on a dark comb. It has not been shown to be compositional or referential beyond that, which is what the word language usually implies.
• Do bees need water?Yes, and more than most people realise. Honey bee colonies collect water for cooling the hive, for diluting stored honey and for making brood food, and water collection is a distinct forager task. A shallow water source with landing places is a genuinely useful thing to provide.
• How good is a bee's memory?Good enough to matter. A single pairing of a scent with sugar can produce an association lasting days, repeated training produces memory that persists for most of a forager's remaining life, and the phase structure — short, mid and long term, with consolidation requiring protein synthesis — closely resembles that in vertebrates.