Honeybees live in social groups consisting of a queen, up to several hundred male drones, and thousands of infertile female workers. The drones mate with the queen only, and the workers protect the hive, forage, and feed and groom the queen. The health of the hive depends on the female workers performing these duties instead of reproducing. What roles do pheromones play in maintaining a functional beehive? Honeybees produce an alarm pheromone when their hive is molested. This pheromone stimulates the bees to protect the hive. If you were to count the number of alarm pheromone receptors in honeybee tissues, which type of bee would likely have the most—a queen, a drone, or a worker? Why?

Video transcript

Hi everyone. Here's the next question. How do social insects such as ants utilize trail pheromones to gather their resources while trail pheromones are put down after an insect finds a source of food. So the insect finds a source of food while foraging. As the insect returns to the colony, it produces trail pheromones. Since this traces its return path that ends up making a trail from the colony to the food source, making it obviously much more efficient to gather those food resources resources. Since its fellow insects can follow the trail directly to the food source instead of having to wander around. And interestingly, they can also produce a greater concentration of pheromones um If it's a higher quality food source, so that will result in more insects, a thicker trail following to higher quality resources. So when we look at our answer choices, we see that choice a does say a worker lays down a trail of pheromones when returning the colony so other workers can use it to find the resources. So that's our correct answer. The other choice is choice be a worker covers the food with trail pheromone so other ants can smell it from a distance. That's not correct answer very small. They can forge very far so much more efficient to have a trail from the colony to the food source choice. C. A worker surrounds food with pheromones to deter other organisms from stealing it. That's not the purpose of trail pheromones. Again, it's indicated by their name. They make a trail for its fellow workers. And finally, d a worker put in some pheromones on the food to make it taste better and avoid spoilage. Again, not the purpose of those pheromones, pheromones are to lead other insects to the food source. See you in the next video.