Do bees communicate with pheromones?
Short answerTrueEstablished evidence
Extensively, and it is the channel that actually holds a colony together. More than a dozen pheromones are known. Queen mandibular pheromone suppresses worker reproduction and queen rearing; brood pheromone shifts nursing and foraging effort; alarm pheromone marks a target and lowers the threshold for stinging.
The main ones
| Pheromone | Source | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Queen mandibular blend | Queen | Suppresses worker ovaries and queen rearing, attracts a retinue, holds a swarm together |
| Brood pheromone | Larvae | Shifts nursing behaviour, pollen foraging and the age of first foraging |
| Sting alarm pheromone | Sting apparatus | Marks a target and lowers the attack threshold nearby |
| Mandibular alarm pheromone | Mandibles | A second, shorter-range alarm signal |
| Nasonov pheromone | Abdominal gland | Means here: used at the entrance, at water, and at a settling swarm |
| Footprint pheromone | Tarsi | Marks recently visited flowers so foragers avoid emptied ones |
How a chemical becomes a colony-level signal
A queen cannot touch twenty thousand bees. Her retinue picks the blend up while grooming and feeding her, and passes it onwards mouth to mouth, so its concentration falls with distance and with colony size. A colony crowded enough for the signal to become dilute is a colony that starts building queen cells, which is one of the mechanisms behind swarming.
Sources
- Pheromone communication in the honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) — Journal of Chemical Ecology (2005) · Peer-reviewed article
- Pheromones of Social Bees — Chapman and Hall (1987) · Monograph
- The Biology of the Honey Bee — Harvard University Press (1987) · Textbook
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