Undertaker Bees: The Worker Bees That Remove Dead Stuff

Worker bees do way more than just make honey. Some of them are undertakers!

The Jobs of a Worker

Worker bees perform various tasks throughout their life, all of which are determined by their evolving biology and the needs of their particular colony.

For the first 3 weeks-ish of a worker bee’s life they are commonly called something along the lines of “house bees.” House bees perform assigned tasks within the hive that shift with developmental milestones until they have matured enough to become “field bees” that can fly far distances and forage.

Undertaker Bees

One of the fun-to-watch jobs of the house bees is the job of the undertaker. The undertaker bees play a critical role in the colony’s health and immune defense by removing dead and diseased bees and other foreign objects from the hive. In this video we can see a few different undertaker bees carrying off drone carcasses.

These things they carry off are sometimes significantly heavier than their own bodyweight. They use everything in them to take the unwanted items as far as they can away for the good of the larger colony. I have sometimes see a bee take a another dead or dying bee and fly high up in the air over 100 feet away. Makes me wonder if they have some kind of sense of how far away certain things have to be distanced in order to maintain the colony’s health.

Seeing Undertaker Bees At Work

This particular colony in the video has been very busy this morning. I purposely put several frames of previously frozen dead brood into my strongest colony yesterday. These frames I froze were removed from a hive that suffered from several fatal maladies, and the act of freezing it’s frames of comb kills most of any remaining parasites or pathogens. Then giving it all to a strong colony will urge them to clean it out, emptying and polishing every single cell to get it ready for filling with either brood or food.

But I am really doing this all as part of my own winter preparation and to pay it forward to the bees for next spring when they need the resources back the most. Since right now is when the bees are trying to decrease and condense everything as much as possible to ready for winter survival, I am trying to tie things up for the fall, even though the season has only just begun.

Drawing wax comb is one of the most energetically expensive things a bee will do in its lifetime. Plus, this time of year for bees, having less extra space is more. So instead of leaving the frames of comb for them to fill, I will take them all back once cleaned and polished and store them. Being able to store comb when it is as clean as possible will help me keep it safe from the irreversible damage of moths and other pests so it can be reused again for many more seasons to come.