BEES PLEASE!

[The Hemispheres Kid]

These fuzzy flying insects are not just fascinating, they are also extremely important for the job they do – do you know what it is?

Pollination! It’s a bee’s job. Flowers make a powder called pollen. When pollen is carried from a flower on one plant to a flower on another plant, the result is called cross-pollination. That’s how flowering plants reproduce. The 20,000 species of bees in the world are the champion pollinators in the insect world.

How do bees carry pollen from one flower to the next? Most bees have spiky or feathery body or leg hairs that collect the pollen as the bee moves around inside the flower – rather like Velcro collecting lint! It’s the female bees who do the work. Male bees don’t collect pollen; they just eat it. When the bee moves to the next flower, some of the pollen dust falls off. If it lands on the right part of the flower – presto, pollination!

But bees don’t move all this pollen around because they’re crazy about flowers. Bees depend on pollen from flowers for their protein and on flower nectar and oils for their energy. Female bees gather pollen to feed their young, called larvae. It’s as if bees were flower farmers, carefully tending their flower gardens in order to raise their food.

Besides buzzing, making honey and stinging, bees are famous for living in complex groups, called colonies. However, did you know that some species of bees, called solitary bees, live alone? In fact, 85% of the bee species in the world are solitary bees!

The life of a solitary bee really is a lonely one. Here’s how it goes: the male and female solitary bees mate in the spring. The female then builds a nest by herself. The nest is made up of individual cells, about 10 in most cases, into each of which the female puts a blob of pollen and nectar. She lays an egg on the blob and then seals the cell. Once she has all her eggs properly stowed away, she leaves. And that’s it! She never returns to see her offspring.

But she has taken care to see that her babies will have enough to eat. When the eggs hatch, the larvae (newborn bees) have the pollen and nectar to feed on. Eventually, they pupate (turn into adult bees) and fly away to begin their own solitary lives.

Despite their name, some solitary bees like to hang out near other solitary bees, so they build their nests close to each other. It’s like a condominium, where each bee has her own private flat but can see her neighbors if she wants to – it’s called a nesting aggregation.

Of course, it’s the other 15% of bees – the honeybees and bumblebees – who have the famous lifestyle! They live in colonies and their social structure is complex and strict. A typical small hive (the nest the bee colony lives in) may have 20,000 bees, so they need a system for living together!

Most of the 20,000-200,000 bees in a hive are worker bees. These are small female bees whose job is to do – everything! They make the cells, gather the nectar and pollen, tend the larvae, clean and defend the hive, and take care of the one and only queen bee. It’s no wonder their life is so short: a mere 20-40 days in the summertime.

The queen bee, who is much larger than the workers, has only one job, but it’s a full-time one. She lays eggs, without a break. After every 20 eggs, some of the workers give her a small meal. She doesn’t leave the hive and has no ability to gather pollen or nectar. Once she can no longer do her job – after a life of about two years – the workers move one of her eggs into a special cell designed only for producing a queen. When the new queen hatches, she destroys any other queen eggs and kills any other hatched queens – she may even do away with her mother!

The third kind of bee that may be in the hive is the drone. Drones are medium-sized males, whose only job is to mate with the queen. They have no stinger and cannot gather food, so when they are no longer needed, they are driven out of the hive to starve to death. The poor drone is unlikely to live long anyway; once he mates with the queen, he dies.

It’s a tough society, but a useful one. The partnership between bees and plants is also good for humans. We don’t just need bees for flowers and honey – we need them to pollinate our fruits and other seed crops! Without proper pollination, a watermelon wouldn’t be sweet. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas, corn, squash, cucumbers, clover, sunflowers…none of them would be any good without the diligent pollination provided by bees. So the next time you see a bee at work, you might want to say thank you, bee!

Bee’s-eye view

Did you know that bees have two compound eyes, made up of thousands of six-sided facets, and three simple eyes? They can see amazingly well – but only up to about one metre in sharp detail! They can even see ultraviolet light, which we can’t. That means that even when it’s cloudy, bees can see where they’re going. (If you want to see how scientists think the world looks to a bee, check out the B-Eye web site at http://cvs.anu.edu.au/andy/beye/beyehome.html).

Now, that’s team spirit!

When a honeybee finds a juicy patch of flowers full of nectar, does she hog it all to herself? She does not! She does a dance that tells the other bees in her hive where to find the feast. She uses the position of the sun to figure out the path they should fly to get there.

A little bee history

Bees evolved from wasp-like insects about 40 million years ago. It took about 10 million years for some bees to develop the kind of social structure honeybees are famous for now. The solitary bees still resemble their primitive wasp relatives more than the honeybees and bumblebees do.

A queen is born

How does an ordinary honeybee larva become a queen? The secret is in how the larva is treated. First of all, the queen-making cell is larger than the ordinary cells, so the larva has more room to grow. She is also fed something called “royal jelly,” which is a mixture of pollen, honey and special fluids from the worker bees. (Honey is made from flower nectar. Once the nectar is stored in the hive, worker bees fan it with their wings, to evaporate the water from it. What’s left is honey.)