Source: Abby Norman, VStv
Albert Einstein once said that if honey bees became extinct, human society would follow in just four years. While we cannot know if that prediction is true, it gets at a larger truth: bees do far more than make honey.
Bees 101
When we think of bees, the honeybee is often the first–if not only–bee to come to mind. They’re just a drop in the bee bucket: at least 20,000 bee species are known to exist in the world, but the number is probably significantly higher as many bee species have not been described by entomologists. The fuzzy insects live everywhere except Antarctica, which makes sense as pollination is their raison d’être–and in polar ice caps, there’s not much by way of vegetation.
Upon sucking nectar from plants with their long tongues, bees enter a symbiotic relationship with the flora: the bees receive nutrients and foodstuffs for their larvae, and the plants flourish.
Bees are eusocial creatures, which means that they live in groups–usually in a hive. Within the hive are the Queen bee and her daughter bees, or worker bees. In the world of bees, males are only used for their insemination ability. After that happens, they’re out of luck.
In fact, just before winter hits, female worker bees ceremoniously kill off all the male bees that have been happily sexing for the summer. They do this in the name of economy: allowing these bees to remain in the hive and lounge around like useless bachelor bees would take valuable reserves away from the worker bees and those being “bred” to possibly be the next Queen.
Source: Abby Norman, VStv
Queens, Princesses…
Several “potential Queens” are nourished in a given year; they receive special treatment from the worker bees, enhanced nutrition (called “royal jelly”) and protection. Once they emerge from the larval stage, these competing queens-to-be engage in a battle royale with one another until only one remains. It is she who will inherit the “throne” when the current Queen dies, or gets so old that the colony essentially removes her from power because she’s useless.
The Queen bee is generally larger than the other bees buzzing around the hive, and can live for up to five years. She is most often the mother of nearly all the worker bees, but sometimes she’s just the most mature, mated female in the hive and therefore assumes Queen status. All Queens are born Virgin Queens, and once she’s chewed her way out of her special Queen cell, she will have to find a male bee—called a drone—to mate with.
Source: Abby Norman, VStv
Boy Bees
Drones have but one purpose in life: to mate. They don’t gather pollen or pollinate, nor do they have stingers. They develop from the alleles of the mother-bee, and technically speaking, have no “father.” As they go about their mating rituals, drones tend to move away from the hive they’re from and instead fertilize the Virgin Queens of another hive, as opposed to their technical “sister” bees.
While it might seem like the drones have it made, there’s a very important caveat to their life of sexual conquest: once they’ve mated, they die, because the very act of pulling out rips their penis from their body. So, as previously mentioned, come autumn when the virgin drones are still buzzing about the hive, to some extent their murder by the worker bees is a mercy killing. To fulfill their evolutionary destiny would be fatal anyhow.
What About The Dancing?
Source: YouTube
Honeybees have a brilliant means of communicating the location of pollination potential to the rest of the hive: they dance. It’s called the “waggle” dance, and it’s not quite twerking… but it’s not that dissimilar, either. After a particular foraging mission, the honeybees can zip back to the hive and, via their well-choreographed dancing language, tell the next round of worker bees where to go–or avoid.
Source: YouTube
OK, The Dance Is Pretty Cool. But Do Bees Die If They Sting You?
Some bees will die after their stingers send you shrieking from the garden, but it’s a myth that all stinging bees have barbed stingers—and thus die when they sting because the stinger gets ripped off.
Worker honeybees are the only bees with barbed stingers–and yes, if they sting you, they will die, because pulling themselves away from their stinger will eviscerate them. Some bees have such tiny, miniscule stingers that they are effectively “stingless bees.” Even if they attempted to sting a target, it would be moot.
In general, bees don’t do a lot of stinging, barbed stinger or not. Stinging is reserved for only extremely threatening situations—particularly where the Queen’s wellbeing is concerned. For the lone bee, it’s far better to just “buzz off” and avoid a fight—especially during the summer months when they are apt to live around six weeks, since they essentially work themselves to death pollinating.
Source: Abby Norman, VStv
Are Bees Disappearing?
Over the last few years bees were making headlines because, for reasons science couldn’t fully explain, they were dying in droves. In a Time Magazine article, one journalist referred to bees as “the country’s smallest and most indispensable farm workers”—which gives you some idea about why we should be more worried about their disappearing act.
The culprit, so far as beekeepers could ascertain, was something called Colony Collapse Disorder, a combination of three primary factors affecting the survival of honeybees. The first, a mite called Varroa destructor, is exactly that: it destroys the honeybees vampirically by sucking its blood. The second, the overwhelming use of pesticides, effectively poisons honeybees as they attempt to pollinate.
The last, a lack of proper nutrition, is mostly our fault. Our manicured lawns, super-crops and other money-making, non-natural sources of creating our foodstuffs is stripping the planet of valuable natural spaces that honeybees used to thrive in. Their only hope, it seems, are the devoted beekeepers who invest time, money and energy into creating habitats for them — often in their own backyards.
We can’t go so far as to blame pesticides for the entirety of the “bee-pocalypse”–in many parts of the world, bee colonies are actually thriving–and make the bee’s swan song into the poster-image for environmentalism, but what we can do is take the opportunity to educate ourselves on these marvelous creatures while there’s still a great deal of buzz about them in the media.
