The Workers: The Hive's Most Industrious Members
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| Worker bees are responsible for just about all the jobs in the hive, home to a very large number of bees. The order within the hive ensures that the worker bees fulfill all their responsibilities. It is God, Who knows all, Who inspires the tens of thousands of bees in how to behave |
Worker bees in the hive are most important in ensuring order and that the work in the hive is performed without anything going wrong. Due to the large numbers of bees in the hive, a lot of work needs to be done. Like the queen, all the workers are female. As soon as they emerge from their cells, they set to work. The worker bees are responsible for much of this such as caring for the young, cleaning, feeding, food-gathering and storage of honey and pollen. Before considering the tasks of the worker bees in detail, we may set out their tasks in the following broad categories:
1. Cleaning the hive
2. Caring for the larvae and the young
3. Feeding the queen and the drones
4. Making honey
5. Building and maintaining the combs
6. Hive ventilation
7. Hive security
8. Gathering and storing such substances as nectar, pollen, water and resin.
Order inside the hive, with its tens of thousands of bees, is ensured by every individual carrying out its duties to the full. But what kind of order is there within the hive? How are the tasks distributed and defined?
The German scientist Gustav Rosch sought answers to these questions. As a result of his experiment, he concluded that the tasks assumed by the workers in the hive depends on their age. According to these results, worker bees take on completely different roles during their first three weeks of life.14 These periods can be divided up as follows:
- First period: Days 1 and 2
- Second period: Days 3 through 9
- Third period: Days 10 through 16
- Fourth period: Days 17 through 20
- Fifth period: Day 21 and after.
But age is not the only factor involved in determining a bee's tasks. Although each bee has its specific responsibilities, in an emergency, bees can also change their duties instantly. This is an enormous advantage in a society as crowded as the hive's. If the distribution of labor among bees were bound by fixed rules, then in the event of some unexpected happening, the colony might face grave difficulties. For instance, in case of a major attack on the hive, if only the sentry bees participated in the fighting and the rest all carried on with their own jobs, this would represent a serious danger to the hive. Yet what actually happens is that a large part of the colony takes part in the defense, and security becomes an immediate priority.
The way that bees suddenly change jobs is actually no different than someone working in the health field suddenly taking up employment in architecture or engineering. To make a comparison with human beings, people capable of serving in different capacities are described as intelligent. Yet when these characteristics, perfectly normal for human beings, come to apply to insects, matters are rather different because human beings acquire experience and an accumulation of knowledge in different areas by undertaking training or learning on the job. Yet bees do not. It is clear therefore that this is an extraordinary situation. How are the accumulated knowledge and abilities of bees to be accounted for? By whom were these skills taught to them?
According to the proponents of the theory of evolution, the root of these myriad abilities is either chance or the old mythological figure of "Mother Nature." Evolutionists maintain that the force they describe as natural selection turns bees into expert architects, dedicated caretakers and expert honey manufacturers. However, the concept of "nature"-a world consisting of birds, insects, reptiles, trees, stones and flowers-cannot produce a bee through a string of coincidences. It cannot create a bee's wing, or the ability whereby all the combs in a hive are crafted according to the same measurements, or the bees' reproductive systems-or, in brief, even a single component of the bee's body. That is because nature itself was also created by God. Every component of nature, and every detail thereof, was created by God.
Like all living things on Earth, bees act in accord with God's inspiration. He is the one and only source of their intelligent behavior and the abilities they possess.
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This article is based on the works of Harunyahya www.harunyahya.com