Food Sharing (Trophallaxis)
Verhalten der Bienen
Bees are constantly passing food to one another.
Bees are constantly passing food to one another. The donor regurgitates a droplet from the honey stomach, it appears between the mouthparts, and the recipient licks it up. The technical term for this is trophallaxis.
The process is more than feeding. The droplet carries the sugar content and aroma of the nectar flow through the colony, and with it the pheromones, including the queen substance from the queen's mandibular glands. Because all bees keep their honey stomachs filled to roughly the same level, the colony uses the willingness to give as a measure of its own supply status.
For the beekeeper, this is what swarm control depends on. If the colony grows strongly in early summer, or if the queen weakens, the queen substance is spread more thinly, and the workers start building queen cells. The pheromone reaches the bees through contact and food sharing, not through the air.