Undertaking duty is simply the removal of dead bee carcasses from the nest, although it is often, perhaps understandably, confused with house cleaning behaviour. During the summer, most deaths, which are probably due to ageing, occur outside the nest, but as we now have more disease related deaths, presumably there are more dead bees to remove. During the winter, many more deaths occur within the nest. Of course, in a natural nest in a tree cavity, the corpses probably drop to the bottom of the cavity to be dealt with by other creatures. Bees tend to keep their immediate nest area clean, which can be seen in a hive, where if there are dead bees on the floor, they are likely to be on the periphery, not where bees are continually walking.

One of the benefits of alighting boards is that bees can be observed, where very often, especially after a few days of non-flying weather in the winter, bees can be seen removing the dead. By observing colonies in this way, I have seen many ways that bees use to remove their dead. This includes being dragged by one or more bees and dropped over the edge of the alighting board, or carried several metres in flight, then dropped, usually by a single bee, but on a couple of occasions, I have seen two bees fly with a corpse.

As a behaviour, I suspect there are differences between a free-living and a managed colony and at times when the death rate is high, I wonder how the colony decides which bees become undertakers. Is it the same ones who simply do more work, or are others recruited?

"Undertaking", rather surprisingly isn't an old term, it was apparently defined by P.K. Visscher (Department of Entomology, University of California) in 1983.

Roger Patterson.

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