Got rhythm?: An investigation into the behavioral patterns of a honey bee queen (Apis mellifera)

Apis mellifera (honey bee) workers assess the needs of their colony and determine whether a fertilized egg (a female) will become a queen or a worker. Depending on whether she is fed royal jelly or worker jelly, the female larva is channeled through a developmental program that will yield either a queen or a worker. The queen is specialized for reproduction for virtually her entire adult life whereas the workers progress through an age-related series of tasks. Younger workers are behaviorally arrhythmic and perform necessary in-hive tasks both day and night. As they age, the worker bees develop a diurnal circadian rhythm just prior to the last task of their lives (foraging). Does the queen also exhibit behavioral rhythmicity? Our working hypothesis is that, once she has navigated her nuptial flight(s), it is not adaptive for the queen to express any circadian rhythmicity in her behavior and therefore there will be no differences in her activity levels between day and night. Observations of active (walking, cell inspections, and egg-laying) and inactive (standing) behaviors performed by a single queen were made at four different 2-hour surveillance periods (two during the day and two during the night), over three consecutive days, once each month for five consecutive months. No behavioral rhythmicity was observed. Further experiments, using a broader scan-sampling approach and multiple queens, will supplement the single-queen study.