They ripped it up into small pieces and several bees carried around these bits of white goo all over the hive as if on a mission. The piece of white goo was a bit of a dead bee larva or pupa. Here you can see what they look like when they are alive.
See the small white worms curled up in the bottom of the cells? Those are the larvae. When they get big enough to turn into pupae, the worker bees cover up the cell with a lid made of wax called a cap. That is what those cells are that have a brown cover on them.
You all learned that bees have different jobs in the hive. In addition to foragers that go out to collect nectar and pollen and nurses that feed the larvae, there are "undertaker" bees. Undertaker bees take away the dead and sick bees. Normally, they will take the dead or sick bee away and drop them outside the hive, but our bees couldn't fly out, so our undertaker bees had to keep carrying around the dead bee.
Undertaker bees are very important to the health of the honeybee hive. They are like the doctors of the hive. They observe the bees carefully, and when they sense a bee is sick or dying, they immediately take action to protect the rest of the hive by removing the bee. Scientists who study bees are very interested in finding out how these bees know when another bee is sick and how they decide it is time to remove the sick bee. Some kinds of honeybees, like those from Africa, are really good at removing sick or dead bees. We call these bees "hygienic" because that means they are good at keeping things clean. Other bees, like our European bees, aren't as good at undertaking. If we could find a way to teach our bees to be more hygienic, perhaps we could help solve some of the health problems our honeybees are having right now.
Photo of honeybee removing dead pupa by Kathy Keatley Garvey of the UC Master Gardener Program. Bee larvae photo by Flickr user dreamexplorer.
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