Karl von Frisch and The Dancing Bees

Karl von Frisch (1886-1982) was the ethologist who described the way the Honey and other bees communicate as a dance. In fact, he discovered that the dance is communication. He won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1973. Jason found me a copy of von Frisch's book, The Dancing Bees: An Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee, and gave it to me tonight. My copy is translated by Dora Ilse, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1953. It has a lot of pictures and diagrams, which are completely lacking in William Longgood's The Queen Must Die. I am excited to learn the intricacies not only of Bee communication, but also the details of making honey and other Bee foodstuffs, and to pass a few portions on to you as they reveal themselves.

The Humble Bumble Bee

Yesterday Jason and I sojourned to the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden for a late afternoon walk through their large plant communities. We saw several birds (heard many more), including male and female Anna's Hummingbirds, one stout, portly Black Phoebe, and Scrub Jays. We also saw and observed quite closely several honey bees roaming the various low-growing perennials in their California Cultivar Garden. We also encountered several Bumble Bees, True Bees of the Family Apidae, which we think were either California or Vosnesenski's Bumble Bees. They hovered among the flowers and made swift, noisy circles around my head. I give you today the description of these local loud and powerful flyers, by Charles L. Hogue, who was Curator of Entomology at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum until his death in 1992:

Familiar to most everyone, bumble bees may be easily recognized by their large size (1/2 to 1 in., or 13 to 25 mm, long) and dense furry covering of black and yellow hairs. They are sometimes confused with the carpenter bees, which are also large but are solid black in color with no yellow patterns. Equally as characteristic of bumble bees as their size and coloration is their loud buzzing flight, to which the name "bumble" refers; the word comes from the Middle English bumblen, which means "to hum." The modern German word for bumble bee is Hummel; In Britain they are sometimes called "humble bees."

Bumble bees are annually social--that is, the colony dies out each winter. A new colony is formed in the spring by a fertile queen who has hibernated in a cervice in a trees [sic] or under bark or in another protected place; Once she has laid the eggs and established the colony, she usually dies. The nest, which is constructed in a cavity in the ground, consists of a cluster of irregular, rounded wax cells sheltered by a matting of dry grass or twigs. The young are reared in these cells on a diet of pollen and honey. There is normally only one brood per year.

The females and workers sting severely, but our species, at least, are not easily provoked.

Four species occur sporadically throughout the basin:

• Sonoran Bumble-Bee (Bombus Sonorus). The body is largely yellow, but the face and tip of the abdomen are black and a thin black band runs across the thorax. This is our most common species, but is no longer abundant. It nests at the base of shrubs and rushes in marshy flats near the coast.
• California Bumble Bee (Bombus californicus). This bumble bee is yellow on the abdominal segment 2 only; the rest of the abdomen and face are black.
  
• Vosnesenski's Bumble Bee (Bombus vosnesenskii). The abdomen of this species has a banded pattern like that of the California Bumble Bee, but the yellow is farther back, on segment 4. The face is yellow.
• Crotch's Bumble Bee (Bombus crotchii). This species is yellow on abdominal segments 2 and 3 only; the apex of the abdomen is reddish, and the face is black.
  

-Insects of the Los Angeles Basin, Charles L. Hogue (Natural HIstory Museum Foundation, 1975, 1993).

Our kitty's name is Bumble Bee, too:

The Secret Life of Insects: The Termite King

Yesterday I received as a gift this lovely, large format, hardbound book, The Secret Life of Insects (P. Passarin D'Entreves and M. Zunino, Orbis, 1976). With chapter headings such as Queen of the termites and The marauding locusts, it's certain to delight us. Let's have a look within for a small morsel, easy to swallow, to satiate us for the time being. How about the males of another truly social insect, like the Honeybees, but those of an order that treats them more mercifully after their nuptial duties are complete? I give you the Termite King:

Just as the queen is the only sexually active female member of the termite community, so the king is the only male capable of fertilizing her. In appearance, the king closely resembles the queen--at least before her abdomen expands to its enormous size.

The exclusive role of the king in the nest is to provide the queen with the sperms that she needs to fertilize her eggs. Copulation may take place only once in the couple's life, or several times, depending on the species. If copulation occurs only once, then the king will have completed his duties and so can spend the rest of his days in total idleness, waited on hand and foot by his attendants. In other cases, he may have to fertilize the queen as often as once a month. Such a degree of activity may well be necessary when the queen is laying vast numbers of eggs every day and needing vast numbers of sperms to fertilize them. The king lives his whole life in the royal apartment, by the queen's side, and is fed on the same food as her, though in much smaller amounts.

*
This book also offers a wealth of sumptuous color photographs, which I will scan and post here as time and inclination allow.

The Silken Trellis of the Narbonne Lycosa

If the sun be fierce or if rain threaten, the Lycosa closes the entrance to her dwelling with a silken trellis-work, wherein she embeds different matters, often the remnants of victims which she has devoured. The ancient Gael nailed the heads of his vanquished enemies to the door of his hut. In the same way, the fierce Spider sticks the skulls of her prey into the lid of her cave. These lumps look very well on the ogre's roof; but we must be careful not to mistake them for warlike trophies. The animal knows nothing of our barbarous bravado. Everything at the threshold is used indiscriminately: fragments of Locust, vegetable remains and especially partciles of earth. A Dragon-fly's head baked by the sun is as good as a bit of gravel and no better.
~The Life of the Spider, The Narbonne Lycosa: The Burrow, J.H. Fabre
(My text is New York, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1918)

The Male Honeybee, or Drone

Male honey bees are called drones. Although they are larger than worker bees, they are still considerably smaller than the queen. There aren't many of them in any given hive--only 200 or 300 compared to up to 30,000 workers. They don't do much, either. They don't, for example, build comb, forage for nectar or pollen, or feed the grubs. For that matter, they aren't even capable of feeding themselves for the first few days of their lives; worker bees must tend them as solicitously as they tend the legless, helpless grubs. They have no stingers and therefore cannot defend the colony against its enemies. About the only contribution to society that drones make is that they inseminate or fertilize the queen. After approximately twenty-four days of development (three days longer than a worker and over a week longer than a queen), drones emerge from their pupation chambers. They receive food from workers for about a week, after which they begin to make short forays out of the hive to scope out the neighborhood. With time, these flights, which usually occur around the middle of the afternoon, get longer and take the drones further from the hive (up to two miles or more). Drones in search of a queen will opportunistically pursue almost anything that flies by, even birds or other inscets. When they finally spot a virgin queen on a nuptial (mating) flight, they take off in pursuit, using her sex pheromone as a guide. A swarm can quickly form behind a queen in flight, often consisting of 100 or more anxious males; these swarms are called drone comets, due to their resemblance to the celestial bodies.

The queen can mate with half a dozen or more males on her nuptial flight, which may involve several forays, but she will never mate again after the completion of her nuptial flight and return to the hive. Queens are known to store sperm for up to seven years. From the drones' point of view, mating is a mixed blessing. The act of copulation, while undoubtedly something for males to do to pass the time, is not only violent, it is actually lethal to the male--he "literally explodes [his] internal genitalia into the genital chamber of the queen and then quickly dies" (Wilson, 1971)
~Bugs in the System, May R. Berenbaum, 1995

How The Lycosa Dines

From her inch-high turret, the Lycosa lies in wait for the passing Locust. She gives a bound, pursues the prey and suddenly deprives it of motion with a bite in the neck. The game is consumed on the spot, or else in the lair; the insects's tough hide arouses no disgust. The sturdy huntress is not a drinker of blood, like the Epeira; she needs solid food, food that crackles between the jaws. She is like a Dog devouring his bone.
~The Narbonne Lycosa, J. H. Fabre