Page 60 - University of Pretoria RESEARCH REVIEW 2018

The Dark Side of the Hive
Robin Crewe, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship
Honey bees have been described as exceptionally clever, well-organised, mutualistic, collaborative, busy, efficient – in short, a perfect society that can act as an exemplar for human societies.
The perfection that is perceived to exist in honey bee societies is a function of a particular experimental focus on the colony as a whole, rather than exploring the idiosyncrasies of its individual members. While the colony is indeed a marvel of harmonious, efficient organisation, it also has a considerable dark side.
Authors Robin Moritz and Robin Crewe write about the life history
of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, highlighting conflict rather than harmony, failure rather than success, from the perspective of
the individual worker in the colony. When one looks carefully, the honey bee colony is far from being perfect. As with any complex social system, honey bee societies are prone to error, robbery, cheating, and social
parasitism. Nevertheless, the hive gets by remarkably well in spite of many seemingly odd biological features that are often dismissed as aberrations, requiring us to focus attention on these ‘aberrations’ since they are central to understanding aspects of social organisation.
Their book dissects the various careers that individual male and female honey bees have and
their roles in colony organisation. Competition between individuals using both physical force and chemical signalling drives colonial organisation, and the authors show how this competition deals with handicaps
that limit the use of physical force and the chemical arms races that drive competition in relation to worker reproduction. Sex determination
allows for male bees to be produced on demand, and no energy therefore needs to be wasted on their continuous production!
Published in 2018, The Dark Side
of the Hive: The Evolution of the Imperfect Honey Bee (OUP) deals with individual mistakes, maladaptations and evolutionary dead-ends that are also part of the bees’ life. The story told about these non-cooperative elements (the dark side of being a member of a society) within the colony spans the full range of biological disciplines, ranging from genomics to systems biology. By moving beyond an experimental study of bee colonies, the book provides a more complete insight into the nature of complex insect societies by focussing on individual contributions to this society of females.
Robin Moritz is an extraordinary professor at UP and an emeritus professor of Molecular Ecology at Martin-Luther- University of Halle-Wittenberg. Robin Crewe is a professor and senior research fellow in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship and a member of the Social Insects Research Group.
Authors Robin Moritz and Robin Crewe, with Vice-Chancellor Cheryl de la Rey.
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