Common Honey Bee Pheromones

by Athena Contus, Athena’s Bees – April 2017
This is dealt with in many places on the web, but I'm just hoping to simplify it here for my students with some important links.

There are two types of pheromones: releaser and primer pheromones.

Releaser pheromones are odors that are fast-acting and behavior-changing, like the smell a bee leaves as a mark on a threat when it is alarmed.

Primer pheromones function much differently: they induce delayed, behavioral or psychological responses. Female worker bees do not lay eggs because they are under the spell of a primer pheromone released by the queen.

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Alarm pheromone – Smells like bananas

The alarm pheromone emitted when a bee stings another animal smells like bananas. Smoke can mask the bees' alarm pheromone.

The other alarm pheromone is released by the mandibular glands and consists of 2-heptanone, which is also a highly volatile substance. This compound has been found to anesthetize some intruding insects for about nine minutes.

Nasonov pheromone – Smells like lemongrass

Nasonov pheromone is emitted by the worker bees and used for orientation and recruitment.

Brood recognition pheromone

Prevents worker bees from bearing offspring in a colony that still has developing young. Both larvae and pupae emit a "brood recognition" pheromone. This inhibits ovarian development in worker bees and helps nurse bees distinguish worker larvae from drone larvae and pupae.

Drone pheromone

Drones produce a pheromone that attracts other flying drones to promote drone aggregations at sites suitable for mating with virgin queens.

Footprint pheromone

This pheromone is left by bees when they walk and is useful in enhancing Nasonov pheromones in searching for nectar.

In the queen, it is an oily secretion of the queen's tarsal glands that is deposited on the comb as she walks across it. This inhibits queen cell construction (thereby inhibiting swarming), and its production diminishes as the queen ages.

Forager pheromone

Ethyl oleate is released by older forager bees to slow the maturing of nurse bees. This primer pheromone acts as a distributed regulator to keep the ratio of nurse bees to forager bees in the balance that is most beneficial to the hive. For my beekeeping this has proven to have a great deal of impact on colonies going into winter. If fields are mowed when possibly two-thirds of my bees are out there foraging, they will be mowed down, returning to the hive in such small numbers a domino effect causes the dwindling phenomenon. See Randy Oliver's "Old Bees, Cold Bees, No Bees". Randy oddly does not mention mowing as a reason for foragers not making it home, but this is what I see and it was addressed at the Apimondia International Beekeeping Conference in Istanbul, 2017, Promoting Bee Friendly Farming Methods - Walter Haefeker