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She loops this way. Loops that way. And she waggles side to side. As a honeybee, she’s not doing the hokey pokey, but she is dancing while she hums. Her movements tell others in her colony what she’s discovered—mostly the direction and distance to a good source of flower nectar and pollen. The scent she carries from the flowers also helps deliver her message.
“Domestic” honeybees live in colonies of several thousand each. Their home is a hive or a hollow in a tree, and each has a single queen bee. Her only job is to lay eggs—up to 1500 a day! The queen has no time to do anything else, but she’s cared for by female honeybees called workers. In fact, these bees do all the work in and around the colony: build combs of wax (using ooze from their glands), clean house, find food, tend the larvae, and defend the colony with their lives. During an attack, their barbed stingers pull right out of their bodies, splitting open their abdomens.
In the heat, workers cool their homes by fanning their wings and, sometimes, by evaporating water. During cold weather, they help warm up the colonies by vibrating their wing muscles without moving their wings.
Worker bees gather pollen and nectar from a huge variety of plants, such as clover, dandelions, and milkweed. They haul balls of the pollen in “pollen baskets”, groups of stiff back leg hairs, and carry the nectar in special stomachs called crops. Back home, they put the nectar into cells in combs and produce honey by beating their wings, evaporating the water in the nectar until it’s less than 18 percent.
If a queen dies or produces too few eggs, the workers have the job of replacing her. They move a fresh egg to a large cell and raise a new queen by feeding “royal jelly” to the larva. It’s a rich mix of honey, pollen, and the flow from bee glands.
Drones, or male bees, mate with the new queen, then burst and die. The queen usually stores enough of their sperm to fertilize all the eggs she will ever lay, and life in the busy colony goes on.
Originally published in YES Mag #41, Jul/Aug 2004
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• In a single day, a honeybee might travel 16 kilometres to gather nectar and pollen for her hive.
• Producing just half a kilogram of honey requires about two million flower visits.
• Honeybees beat their wings approximately 200 times per second.
• Whatever the outside temperature, honeybees can heat—or cool—their hives to create an inside temperature of about 32 C.
• Fights within human families were thought to drive honeybees away from a hive.
• A baby whose lips were touched by honeybees was supposed to become a great speaker or storyteller.
• Bad luck followed anyone who ate honey or used wax made by the bees of an enemy—so folks in parts of the United States believed.
• Feeling down or upset? Some families looked to honey as a “cure”.
• In the southern United States, people saw a swarm of honeybees as a death warning, and a sting as a sign of betrayal. |
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