Bee-hind The Scenes Part 2
© Despina Rosales, 2005
First published in The School Magazine
(Orbit, August 2005, Vol. 90, No. 7).
Republished by ProQuest in 2006.
Last month you got the buzz from us about what goes on in a beehive.
For this month's Orbit, our reporter got into full bee disguise, and flew to Honeywood as an undercover agent and went even further bee-hind the scenes.
In this never-before-attempted covert operation, our reporter infiltrated the private world of bees by being accepted as one of them. Yep, the bee costume really worked, and she discovered some amazing but true stuff that you won’t bee-lieve!
Phase One: Infiltration
When bees build a hive, they cover its inside walls with a special flower scent, a different scent for each hive. All the bees in a hive have the same scent, so strangers can are be easily sniffed out and driven away.
This was my first challenge - my disguise made me look like one of them, and now I had to smell like them to get past the guard bees that patrol the hive’s entrance. I knew that the guards would be quick to mobilise the bee-army and attack, so there was no room for error. I cleverly covered myself in the aroma of the hive and casually strolled towards the entrance.
The guards sniffed at me for a while.
They looked at me closely. They flew around and buzzed about, inspecting me from all angles. Finally, one of them stamped my wrist and nodded for me to go through. I was in!
Phase Two: In The Hive
Every bee has five eyes. Do the maths: in a hive of 80,000 bees who have five eyes each, I had almost half a million eyes watching me as I walked in.
You may ask: what does such a small creature do with all those eyes? I'll tell you: three of them are called simple eyes and they detect light; the other two are larger compound eyes and they detect movement.
And boy, do they detect movement!
A bee's compound eye contains about 6,900 facets, which means that when a bee watches you move around, it doesn't see a constantly moving picture. Instead it sees a series of still pictures - like frozen frames from a movie. It’s like when you hit the pause button on the DVD player: a bee sees every movement as though it were pressing the pause button all the time and jumping through the movie one frame at a time.
So when I walked into the hive, not only did I all those eyes looking at me, but those eyes could detect every single move I made.
Have you ever seen one of those petrol tankers that deliver fuel to service stations? Well, I found out that bees are just like those petrol tankers. Every bee has its own little 'tank' (or tummy) that it carries things around in. Each bee has a small tummy for itself that receives and digests food (just like ours do), and a large one - the 'tank' - that it uses in the same way you use your school backpack. But instead of carrying books, the bee carries water or nectar back to the hive.
Imagine if you had a tummy-tank instead of a backpack. The next time your teacher said, “OK, everyone, get out your maths books,” instead of hearing Zzzzip you would hear Bluuurgh! "Uh-oh, some of you forgot to take your pens out." Bluurgh! Out come the pens. Oops, need some liquid paper...Bbbblurgh!
And when it was time to pack up your stuff at the end of the day, you’d have to swallow it all to put it away.
Hmmm…don’t you feel lucky to have a backpack?
During my first few days in the hive, I quickly learned that I couldn’t just talk to the other bees to communicate. Bees can speak to each other, but not with actual words. Instead, they communicate by dancing. So I had to master some new moves. I had to learn the Waggle Dance, the Shake Dance and, last but not least, the Tremble Dance.
A worker bee performs the Waggle Dance to tell the other workers about the nectar she has found - its direction and distance from the hive, and its quality:
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The angle of her waggle points in the direction of the nectar.
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The length of the waggle indicates how far the source of the nectar (usually a flower patch is from the hive. A short waggle says that the nectar is close by, and a longer waggle means it is further away - so the longer the waggle, the greater distance the bees have to travel to reach it.
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The vigour of the waggle reveals how good the nectar is - so a big, energetic waggle means that the nectar is top-notch, and a less enthusiastic waggle says that it’s just average.
The Shake Dance is done when there is so much nectar in the flower patch that more bees are needed to collect it. The Tremble Dance is performed when there is so much nectar in the hive that more bees are needed to process it into honey.
Phase Three: A Dramatic Exit
The time came when I had to say goodbye to life as a bee. But a bee can’t just leave a hive whenever she feels like it. Being part of a hive is a long-term commitment, just like school is a long-term commitment for you. The difference is that you get to leave school in Year 12, whereas a bee has to stay in the hive until it dies.
So I had a plan: I faked my own death. You see, some bees have the job of undertaker, which means that their task is to rid the nest of dead bees. In order to get out I had to pretend to be dead, and so one day, while out foraging for nectar, I ripped the stinger from my bee costume as though I had just stung someone.
When I got back to the hive I keeled over, writhing madly and buzzing like crazy. Then I lay still. Soon, I was carried out with the rest of the deceased. It wasn’t pretty, but it got me out of there in one piece and without blowing my cover.
Phase Four: Aftermath
Living for a time as a bee changed my life. I used to take honey for granted, but now I know about all the hard work that goes into making it and I savour every taste.