The Bien (Colony as Superorganism)
Lexikon
The Bien refers to the bee colony as a whole, that is, not as the sum of individual insects but as a living being in its own right.
The Bien refers to the bee colony as a whole, that is, not as the sum of individual insects but as a living being in its own right. The Bien can do things that no individual bee can, for example maintaining an even temperature for months, even though the individual animal is cold-blooded.
The term is old. It already appears in Johann Ludwig Christ in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Johannes Mehring compared the Bien to a vertebrate and assigned the queen and the drones the role of the reproductive organs, and the workers that of the digestive system. Ferdinand Gerstung developed this idea further.
In biology, this corresponds to the concept of the superorganism, coined by William Morton Wheeler at the beginning of the twentieth century with reference to ant colonies. Its hallmark is that most individuals are excluded from reproduction, similar to how body cells relate to germ cells.
For practice, the idea is more than a figure of speech. Anyone who thinks of a colony as an organism understands better why removing brood, moving combs, or the loss of a queen does not affect only individual bees, but changes the whole functioning of the colony.