Bee-hind The Scenes Part 1
© Despina Rosales, 2005
First published in The School Magazine
(Orbit, July 2005, Vol. 90, No. 6).
Republished by ProQuest in 2006.
Ever wondered what all the buzz is about in a beehive? Let’s take a trip to Beverly Hives and the luxurious Honeywood area to find out what really happens bee-hind the scenes.
An Audience With The Queen
Unlike human queens, bee queens don’t have an easy job. In fact, it’s non-stop work.
“Just like an average bee I live in a hive,” says Liz, the Queen Bee. “But I’m bigger than the other bees and have a much longer life. Worker bees only live for one or two months, but I'll live until I’m three years old.”
So far it sounds like a pretty good life - you get to be queen, and you get to live longer.
“My main task is to have thousands and thousands of babies,” continues Liz.
Thousands and thousands of babies? Hmmm…life as a queen is starting to sound difficult.
“In fact I lay one egg per minute, day and night,” she says.
This means that in a 24-hour day, a queen bee lays approximately 1,500 eggs. That’s around 500,000 eggs in a year and over one-and-a-half million eggs in a lifetime! Phew! But why lay so many eggs? Well, the eggs don’t just stay eggs forever, they hatch into bees. Why so many bees? Simple: it takes lots of bees to make honey.
But there’s another reason the queen has to keep on laying all those eggs. Liz explains: “In one day I can lay my own weight in eggs; it’s a tiring job, but I can’t stop for a rest. If I slow down, the workers will move a newly laid egg into a special queen-making cell to produce my replacement. As soon as the new queen is hatched, I’m out of a job. And not only that, the new queen will either kick me out of the hive or kill me.”
Talk about pressure!
You’d think that 24-hour-non-stop-egg-laying would be enough work for a queen, but there’s still one more task that she must do: decide whether the baby bees will be boys or girls. The queen does this by fertilising most of the eggs so that they become female, leaving the rest unfertilised to become male.
All Worker Bees Do Is…Work!
Worker bees are all female and make up about 85 percent of the bees in a hive. So with the queen in charge and female bees making up most of the population, you can see that beehives are run by girl power.
“Sure, we girl-bees rule the hive, but it’s not an easy life,” says Jane the Worker Bee. “There are always chores to be done.”
Even though workers are the smallest bees in the hive, they have the biggest jobs to do. They have three life stages, and during each stage they have particular responsibilities.
“Young workers-which are bees that are one to 15 days old-have the task of tidying up, taking care of the queen and tending the brood, (which is the eggs that haven’t hatched yet)," says Jane. “They also decide which fertilised eggs to put in worker cells to become worker bees, and which one to put in a queen cells to become a queen bee.”
Worker bees that are 15 to 25 days old have very different duties. “Middle-aged workers, like me, construct the comb and make sure the nest is well ventilated," continues Jane. "sometimes we act as hive guards, you know, to keep our unwelcome visitors. And that's not all: we also prepare and store the nectar and pollen brought back by the older workers. The nectar is used to make honey and pollen is food for the baby bees."”
The oldest workers spend the rest of their lives scouting and foraging for nectar and pollen - and also for water and propolis. Propolis, or "bee glue", is a resinous material from the buds of trees. Bees use it to patch and strengthen their hive.
Worker bees have to move pretty fast to get all all their foraging and scouting done. That’s why their wings flap over 11,000 times every minute. Imagine how tired you would be if you flapped your arms that many times for just one minute!
Well, luckily you don’t have to, but worker bees do, and when they do they can fly at speeds of up to 35 kilometres per hour. That means that they travel almost the same speed as the bus when it drives in the school zone.
“A worker can travel more than seven kilometres from home on a single flight,” says Jane. “That’s about the same time as a 150 centimetre tall human ‘flying’ 700 kilometres in one go.”
Phew! That’s a long distance! If you compare it to running the length of a football field - usually around 100 metres - you can get a better idea of how far that is. You’d need to do 7,000 laps of the field to cover 700 kilometres. And while you're thinking about that, think about this: if it took you five minutes to run each kilometre - and you'd have to be super fit! - then it would take you nearly 60 hours to complete 700 kilometres. That is if you could keep going for that long.
A Lot Of Work For A Little Honey
With all that hard work, you’d think that the worker bees would make oodles of honey. Well, all together they do, but in the course of her lifetime a single worker bee only produces one-twelfth of a teaspoon full of honey. Go into your kitchen and look at a teaspoon to see just how little that is.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot,” says Jane the Worker Bee, “But worker bees don’t live long, and we are very small creatures, so it’s not a bad effort when you think about it.”
In a single collecting trip, each older worker visits between 50 and 100 flowers and returns to the hive carrying over half her weight in nectar and pollen.
“It’s a pretty heavy load, but we need to make the honey to survive,” says Jane. It takes around one kilogram of honey to provide enough energy for a small beehive to survive a winter. A productive hive can make up to four kilograms each day. That’s the equivalent of four big jars of honey in your cupboard, which gives you heaps of honey-on-toasts for breakfast and loads of dollops-of-honey in a hot drink at night.
To make that honey for your toast and hot drinks, all the workers in a hive collectively fly more than 800, 000 kilometres. That’s 8 million laps of a football field - without so so much as a lunchbreak!
Boy Bees: Drones Are Not Boring
In an average hive of 80,000 bees, 68,000 of them are workers. There’s just one queen, as you know, so who are the rest of the bees? The males of course!
Male bees are called drones. They have a very different career path to the worker bees, and from birth they have certain advantages. To start with, when baby workers hatch, they have to climb out of their brood cells all by themselves, but baby drones are helped out by the young worker bees.
“We don't have to do a single thing around the nest,” says Dave the Drone. “No cleaning, no foraging for nectar or tending to the queen. And we can’t clean, groom or feed ourselves. So the worker bees have to look after us. Yes, being a drone is an easy life.”
It may be easy, but being a drone is not always a bed of honey.
When winter approaches and food is in short supply, guess who gets chucked out of the nest and left to die? You’ve got it: the drones. Workers don’t hesitate to throw them out if their survival or that of the queen is in danger. This is because, sadly for the drones, they are the least useful of all the bees.
So, why have them around at all? What in the world do drones do?
“We have one mission in life, and that is to mate with the queen,” says Dave. In fact, drones have extra-large eyes to ensure that they don’t lose sight of the queen on the mating flight.
“When the time is right,” says Dave, “All the drones meet at a special place far away from the hive. When we get there, we mate with the queen, sometimes up to 30 metres off the ground. That’s around the same height as a two-storey house.”
Dave looks a little nervous during this part of the interview. When we ask him why, he buzzes weakly and reveals the truth.
“When a drone fulfils his only purpose in life, he pays the ultimate price,” Dave gulps. “His reproductive parts get ripped out of him, and he dies!”
Bee-lieve It Or Not, A Sting Hurts A Bee More Than You
Worker bees and queen bees are the only types of bees that can sting. So if you ever get stung, you’ll know that it’s a worker whose office you messed up or a queen whose royal robes you crumpled.
A queen bee’s stinger is barb-less, so she can sting without dying. But a worker’s stinger is barbed, which means that it has lots of little hooks on it. This is OK if the worker stings another insect, such as a honey-stealing moth. In that case, the stinger pierces the moth, venom is pumped from the venom sac into the moth, the bee pulls out her stinger easily and flies away.
But if a worker bee stings a mammal, such as a human, the little hooks anchor the stinger into the mammal’s skin. This means that after the bee injects the venom into the mammal, its stinger is stuck there. As the bee flies away the stinger is ripped out of the bee’s tummy, and she soon dies from this injury.
A Spew And A Chew
Yes, bee-lieve it or not, bees make honey with a spew and a chew! To be more precise, they start with nectar (a sugary water) which they get from flowers and store in a special nectar stomach - next to their real stomach. Back at the hive they spew up the nectar. Then hive-based worker bees chew on the nectar spew for about half an hour, even passing it from mouth to mouth. The chewing introduces enzymes from the bees' saliva that change the nectar into something more digestible and less vulnerable to bacteria - so it will last longer when stored. then the bees spit this out into wax storage cells. But before they seal up the cell with a wax plug, they make sure that, in the warm hive, it has evaporated more of its water content and thickened into syrupy honey!
So honey is nothing but bee’s barf and slobber. Gross out!
Well, the idea of eating bee vomit and spit may be totally gross, but honey still tastes yummy, don’t you agree?