Buzzing by the 'Burg
Bees' habits contribute to the ecological community
By Callan Bentley
Flat Hat Variety Editor
That fateful day in fifth grade started out like any other.
I ate my Golden Grahams and
walked the two blocks to Tuckahoe Elementary School. We sat through the normal
lineup of fifth grade activities: the word of the day ("tapir"), math
class, and history. After a carton of Shenandoah's Pride and a PBJ, we headed
out for recess. At Tuckahoe, we fifth graders spent our recess time in one of
three ways. We (a) built forts in the woods, (b) played Boys-Chase-The-Girls
(or its exciting vice versa), or (c) we threw rocks at the hornets' nest.
This day we opted for the
latter. The hornets' nest was a hole at the base of a tree trunk, a gaping maw
of wood that had some slimy whitish secretion all around it. In retrospect,
it may have been sap leaking from the tree, but as a fifth grader I thought
the hornets made the slime. Our operation was this: the fifth grade boys would
stand in a semi-circle about 20 feet from the nest, count to three, and launch
a barrage of stones. We would then run en masse to a preselected hiding place,
where we would wait for the swarm to calm down. Then, when the coast was clear,
we would do it again.
On one escape though, Richard
howled with pain and fell to the ground. We ran over to him and in the heroic
tradition of the best PG-rated war movies, we pulled him out of range of the
hive. He wouldn't sit upright: The poor guy had been stung in a bad place. A
closed-doors boys' room examination followed, and verified his worst fears.
Richard had taken the stinger in his butt.
Though it was tough for Richard to sit through language arts class that afternoon, he eventually recovered enough to join in that afternoon's round of Boys-Chase-The-Girls. What became of the hornet, we never knew.
Hornets fall with the bees,
ants, and wasps in the Order Hymenoptera. Some people may be surprised to learn
of this close connection between the ants and the flying, stinging insects,
but the distinction between them is more blurred than it often appears. There
are both flying ants and non-flying wasps. Many species in both groups are social
animals, meaning they live in close, cooperative association with other individuals.
In a bee hive, different
individuals are assigned different tasks, which they perform for the good of
the hive. The queen bee lays eggs. Foraging bees come and go. Guards watch for
enemies. Workers cool the interior of the hive by fanning their wings rapidly.
The bees don't change their jobs; They spend their entire lives doing the jobs
they were born to do. There is no career ladder equivalent among the Hymenoptera.
Inside the hive, fascinating
behavior occurs. A pollen-collecting bee who has discovered a stand of particularly
nectar-rich flowers will fly back to the hive and communicate the flowers' location
to her fellow bees. She does this by way of an interpretive dance on a parquet
of honeycomb. Watching her waggling her abdomen in coded rhythms, the other
bees are able to take flight and find their way to the food. They never miss.
Giving directions to one's peers is a complex task, requiring a level of abstraction
not usually noted among the so-called "lower" animals. Yet bees manage
it without fail every day.
The foraging bees will eat
the nectar from the flowers and regurgitate it back at the hive. They use their
own stomachs as grocery bags, and so feed workers who are slated tonever
leave the honeycomb.
Bees have evolved in association
with the flowering plants. Special pockets on the hindmost set of the bees'
legs have developed to carry pollen. Perhaps you have noticed these fat yellow
"saddlebags" bulging from the black legs of a bumblebee. Bees depend
on flowers for their nourishment, and the flowers depend on the insects to transfer
pollen from bloom to bloom. It is estimated that if all the kinds of bees in
the world were exterminated tomorrow, within a decade 100,000 species of flowering
plants will also disappear from the Earth.
The bee's antennae are not
tactile organs, as one might suppose, but actually are the insect's organs of
smell. Noses on sticks, if you will. Each antenna is equipped with most than
2,000 sensory plates.
Their eyes are colorblind
but they can see ultraviolet light that we cannot. In fact, flowers have adapted
to this facet of bee ability as well. When viewed with an ultraviolet light,
many flowers show intense, complicated designs to attract bees and even "guide"
them in for a safe landing, in the manner of lights along an airport runway.
For most local honeybees,
six weeks is all the lifetime they'll ever see. Constant egg-laying and hatching
is the only way to keep pace with the high mortality rate. In open fields, it
is estimated that more than 1,000 bees from the same colony may die in a single
day, exhausted from their intense work. Of course, some bees never make it to
the point of exhaustion: predation and sacrifice take their toll on hive population.
When a honeybee stings you,
she is committing suicide. The stinger, a modified egg-laying device, is barbed.
It therefore sticks in the victim and cannot be pulled free. To get away from
the stingee, the bee will pull away from the end of its own abdomen. This is
high trauma for a bee, and the wound is always terminal.
The little holes in honeycomb
are the chambers in which the bee embryos develop. If the eggs are fertilized
when the queen bee lays them, the resultant insect will be a worker bee. If
the eggs are unfertilized, then the bee will be a drone. Hence, drones have
only one parent, the queen. But she came from a fertilized egg with both a mother
and a father. It follows, then, that the drone has a grandfather but no father.
It was a drone bee that sank
its stinger into Richard's derriere. The insect sacrificed himself for the protection
of the hive. Though Richard recovered, the hornet's defense mechanism worked
well. None of the rest of the fifth grade boys wanted to end up with a swollen
tush, and we never threw rocks at the hive again. Re-channeling our creativity
and need for physical exercise, we had soon developed a new game along similar
lines. We called it Throw-Rocks-At-The-Girls.