Adult bees carrying dead bees out of the hive and flying off with their bodies.
One of the specialty niche jobs of worker bees is removal of dead bees. This task is performed by only a small subset of a colony’s adult population. Undertaker bees grab a corpse (identified by two pheromones, oleic acid and beta-ocimene), drag it from combs or from the bottom board, and carry it to the hive entrance. The same bee or another then flies out of the hive carrying the body and drops it several feet away.
Corpse removal is important for colony hygiene; some individuals do this job over and over again, over a period of many days, but most bees never remove a corpse in their entire lives.
Trumbo ST and Robinson GE. 1997. Learning and Task Interference by Corpse-removal Specialists in Honey Bee Colonies. Ethology 103(11): 966-975. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1997.tb00138.x
Robinson GE. 2021. Three Bees I Have Known. Bee Culture. Accessed 2023. https://www.beeculture.com/three-bees-i-have-known/
