The Roles of Queens, Drones and Worker Honey Bees

The Roles of Queens, Drones and Worker Honey Bees Honey bees are social creatures that enlist a caste system to accomplish the tasks that ensure the survival of the colony. Thousands of worker bees, all sterile females, assume responsibility for feeding, cleaning, nursing, and defending the group. Male drones live to mate with the queen, who is the only fertile female in the colony.   The Queen The queen bee is the dominant,  adult female bee that is the mother of most, if not all the bees in the hive. A future queen bees larva is selected by worker bees to be nourished with a protein-rich secretion known as royal  jelly so that it can sexually mature.   A newly hatched queen begins her life in a duel to the death with any other queens present in the colony and must destroy potential rivals that have not yet hatched. Once she accomplishes this, she takes her virgin mating flight. Throughout her life, she lays eggs and secretes a pheromone that keeps all other females in the colony sterile. Drones A drone is a male bee that is the product of an unfertilized egg. Drones have bigger eyes and lack stingers. They cannot help defend the hive and they  do not have the body parts to collect pollen or nectar, so they cannot contribute to feeding the community. The drones only job is to mate with the queen. Mating occurs in flight, which accounts for the need of the drones for better vision, which is provided by their large eyes. Should a drone succeed in mating, he soon dies because the penis and associated abdominal tissues are ripped from the drones body after sexual intercourse. In the fall in areas with colder winters, worker bees mind the food stores and prevent drones from entering the hive since they are no longer needed, effectively starving them to death. Workers Worker bees are female. They accomplish every chore unrelated to reproduction, which is left up to the queen bee. In their first days, workers tend to the queen. For the remainder of their short lives (just a single month), workers keep busy. Newly hatched worker bees are larvae, unable to feed themselves. Worker bees feed their larvae a liquid called worker jelly, and they eat as many as 800 times a day to build up fat stores. After eight or nine days, larval worker bees spin cocoons and enter the pupal stage. Three weeks later, fully-formed worker bees chew through their cocoons; just a few hours later theyre ready to go to work. There are many jobs for workers to do, such as preserving  honey, feeding drones, building the honeycomb, storing pollen, removing the dead, foraging for food and nectar, carrying in water, fanning the hive to maintain the proper temperature, and guarding the hive against invaders such as wasps. Worker bees also make the decision, when necessary, to relocate the colony in a swarm  and then rebuild the new nest. Maintaining proper temperature for the hive is crucial for the survival of the eggs and larvae. The brood chamber for the bees young must remain at a steady temperature to incubate the eggs. If it is too hot, the workers collect water and deposit it around the hive, then fan the air with their wings causing cooling by evaporation. If it is too cold, the worker bees cluster to generate body heat.

Definition and Examples of Derivation in English

Definition and Examples of Derivation in English In morphology, derivation is the process of creating a new word out of an old word, usually by adding a prefix or a suffix. Adjective: derivational. Linguist Geert Booij notes that one criterion for distinguishing derivation and ​inflection is that derivation may feed inflection, but not vice versa. Derivation applies to the stem-forms of words, without their inflectional endings, and creates new, more complex stems to which inflectional rules can be applied (The Grammar of Words, 2005).   Derivational change that takes place without the addition of a bound morpheme (such as the use of the noun impact as a verb) is called zero derivation or conversion. From the Latin, to draw off. Examples and Observations Derivational morphology studies the principles governing the construction of new words, without reference to the specific grammatical role a word might play in a sentence. In the formation of drinkable from drink, or disinfect from infect, for example, we see the formation of new words, each with its own grammatical properties.(David Crystal, How Language Works. Overlook Press, 2005 Derivation versus Inflection Morphology may be divided into derivationrules that form a new word out of old words, like duckfeathers and unkissableand inflectionrules that modify a word to fit its role in a sentence, what language teachers call conjugation and declension. (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Basic Books, 1999)The distinction between inflectional morphology and derivational morphology is an ancient one. Fundamentally, it is a matter of the means used to create new lexemes (derivational affixes among other processes) and those used to mark the role of the lexeme in a particular sentence (accidence, inflectional morphology). . . .It seems that although we probably can maintain a distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology relatively well in Englishalbeit with certain problematical cases which do not invalidate the fundamental notionthe distinction is not helpful to us in understanding any other aspects of the morphology of English. The classification might be useful in terms of typology, but does not throw much light on the behavior of English morphological processes.(Laurie Bauer, Rochelle Lieber, and Ingo Plag, The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology. Oxford University Press, 2013 Derivation, Compounding, and Productivity Word-formation is traditionally divided into two kinds: derivation and compounding. Whereas in compounding the constituents of a word are themselves lexemes, this is not the case in derivation. For instance, -ity is not a lexeme, and hence taxability is a case of derivation. The word income tax, on the other hand, is a compound since both income and tax are lexemes. Changing the word class of a word, as happened in the creation of the verb to tax from the noun tax, is called conversion, and may be subsumed under derivation. . . .Morphological patterns that can be systematically extended are called productive. The derivation of nouns ending in -er from verbs is productive in English, but the derivation of nouns in -th from adjectives is not: it is hard to expand the set of words of this type such as depth, health, length, strength, and wealth. Marchand (1969: 349) has observed some occasional coinings like coolth (after warmth)  but notes that such word coinings are often jocular, a nd hence do not represent a productive pattern. If we want to coin a new English noun on the basis of an adjective, we have to use -ness or -ity instead. (Geert Booij, The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology. Oxford University Press, 2005 Changes to Meaning and Word Class: Prefixes and Suffixes Derivational prefixes do not normally alter the word class of the base word; that is, a prefix is added to a noun to form a new noun with a different meaning:Derivational suffixes, on the other hand, usually change both the meaning and the word class; that is, a suffix is often added to a verb or adjective to form a new noun with a different meaning: patient: outpatientgroup: subgrouptrial: retrialadjectivedark: darknessverbagree: agreementnounfriend: friendship (Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, and Geoffrey Leech,  Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman, 2002)