Linger Shall We With The Bees

I've been thinking about my humming little blog, Insectatext, that I should quickly add more entries about other insects. I have a nice collection on the ever-fascinating Cockroaches (order: Blattidae), for example. But as I've been reading about bees, I am forced to reconsider; why rush? There's no hurry. Let's linger among the honey bees a while.

Here von Frisch speculates on Bee Synaesthesia:

Owing to the presence of an entire forest of minute tactile hairs, which we may see dispersed between the olfactory pores, the feelers, known to be the bee's most important organs of smell, serve also as her most important organs of touch. Such a double function, if we only come to think of it, must have peculiar consequences. It certainly makes no difference to the human nose whether the object it smells is short or long, round or square. The odorous substances bring no information about the shape of the object by which they are emitted, when they reach the back of the nasal cavity. It is quite different with the bee, however. A bee, whose feelers, in the darkness of the hive, touch an object in order to examine it--be it a cell of the combs smelling of wax, a newly laid egg, or one of her grubs--is bound to perceive in the two different impressions of touch and smell in very close association. Bees may therefore be expected to perceive a smell "plastically".

--Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees, 1953, p.56

An informative poem about honey bees.

The Dancing bees, in their unshamed light, devour the sun's doing and regurgitate it again.

They take on a secret form. From a soft chitin dermis they emerge, pale, then harden, hairy and wet, and clean themselves.

At sunset, when the air cools, they return to their hives, loaded with pollen or nectar, and desposit these resources in the outer cells. In about two days, the fermented nectar becomes honey.

The Drone's eyes are close together, making him appear a little daft. The Workers feed the Drones until the end of Summer, when they tear them to shreds and toss them over the hive landing board, there to perish helplessly in the dust or grass. This is called The Massacre of the Drones.

To feed herself and her tribe, the bee consumes a tiny droplet of nectar collected from a flower. The nectar is a clear, sugary substance that flowers perspire at the very base of their petals. The bee swallows it and it descends to the Honey Sac, an antechamber of the stomach. There it sits, to hold in wait, small amounts being released into the stomach as the bee's energy wanes. She has conscious control over this mechanism.

If she is not at work she patrols the hive; appearing to be idle, she is actually conducting a survey. If she finds something amiss in one part of the hive, she will alert the others, and all will contribute their force, sometimes re-activating long unused cellular and glandular mechanisms, to right whatever has gone wrong and reinstate a condition of balance.

The bees taste my hands, but leave them empty. Sometimes a bee stings me if she suspects I've come to loot the hive. She dies in the act. I haven't seen the bees at night, collected around the Queen in a moving bulb.

The Queen Bee, on her nuptial flight, is inseminated with enough sperm to keep her laying eggs incessantly for one to seven years. The Drone who inseminates her dies from the massive wound left by his depositor's being ripped out after ejaculation.

Bees born in the Spring live up to 5 weeks. Bees born in Autumn live longer, hibernating in the hive through Winter, gathered in a mass around the Queen to keep her temperature high. The outside of the mass may be as low as 55 degrees, whereas the inside of the mass, closest to the Queen, reaches 95 degrees.

Bees' sense of smell is located in their antennae. Bees become flower-constant, each bee specializing in a single type of flower, learning how to quickly and efficiently collect resources from that flower alone. It is through a well-developed sense of scent that, once close to the plants of the field, bees locate their special flowers.

Karl von Frisch Does Sweet Talk

As promised...

It is incorrect to say that bees collect honey; they collect nectar, from which they make honey. Freshly collected nectar is distributed amongst the members of the colony who, by means of repeated regurgitations, expose droplets of it to the warm air through their mouths. In this way, much of the water evaporates and the substance then thickens once more in the open cells. Honey, which keeps well, develops out of the thin nectar in a few days. At the same time, by the addition of glandular secretions, sugar is transformed into an easily digestible form by the same process that goes on in our own digestive tracts. The work of digestion is thus perfomred in advance. Also, by a process still unknown to us, the honey absorbs certain substances from the flowers and also from the bees' bodies which increases its food value. In this way, bees convert the sweet juices of flowers into delicious food.
-p. 13, The Dancing Bees, Karl von Frisch, 1953