For November, let's talk about
Honey Bees. :thumb104043610:
:thumb269627616:
(by
aem-creations) (by
MogieG123) (by
StandingBehindYou)
The honey bees are those bees that are often called "true bees". This just means that they belong to the "tribe"
Apini within the genus
Apis, all of which are true bees but only the Apinis are honey bees. There are many species of honey bee, but the most common one we think of is the domesticated species, which is the European Honey bee (
Apis mellifera).
Without our friends the Apinis, we would... all be dead!
Honey bees are best known for the fact that they pollinate the hell out of plants that humans and most other animals like to eat, which is to say they pollinate most plants in the northern hemisphere above the tropics. The tropics are the only places that would be okay without honey bees; they have all manner of hummingbirds, bats, moths, and other insects that have evolved to cover this very important role in nature.
But up north, we have honey bees plus a few straggler species related to those of the tropics (some wasps, a few moths, and one or two hummingbirds that pollinate). So honey bees are of dire importance for anyone who live north of Cuba, especially if we want to not starve. So we ought to learn a lot about them, what they need, and what is killing the hell out of them right now.
Let's start with some basic info: Honey bees are colony-builders, using a waxy substance they create to build massive internal honeycomb structures to store food and house larvae. And let's not forget the Queen because she is the centerpiece of it all. The Queen honey bee is like a master key to all the other bees within their social structure; whatever the Queen wants, she gets, due to the hard-wired communication techniques ingrained in every single bee in her hive. Individually, bees are pretty dull: They rely on memory and instinct alone and thus are pretty bad at adapting to a new situation unless it has been communicated to them through the Queen's orders. Bees have been known to stubbornly fly into a patch of ground or tree when the landmarks around their own hive have been moved to that location, unable to comprehend that the hive is absent. But in a group, bees are formidable and self-sacrificing. The Queen is the reason for all of this because she controls the pheromones that "give orders" to the worker bees in the hive. She is also the only breeding female in the entire hive, and the hive depends on her doubly for it.
The workers are the care-givers and breadwinners of the hive, all of them non-breeding females. They seal eggs that the Queen lays into wax cells, and when the eggs hatch they pop them open and begin feeding them with the stores of honey. Potential Queen larva are fed exclusively "royal jelly" instead, which is a secretion which activates the reproductive parts of the larva. These bees, able to breed, develop into queens instead of workers. Worker bees only do this when the current Queen is weak or absent.
Though worker bees may not possess common sense (see above reference to moving hive landmarks), they do possess a fair bit of raw logical intelligence. Worker bees are great communicators to other bees, "dancing" to inform other workers what lies ahead or where the blooming flowers are. They have varying dances for various meanings including a dance that essentially means "get over here, I've got nectar, now stick it in the hive before I fall over".
Honey bees, like several kinds of wasp, establish new hives by swarming. They do not build a hive by a single Queen finding a new spot--their set-up takes a lot of planning, scouting, and eventually a mass of workers escorting the Queen to the site and quickly building the framework around her.
This hive is very important because, unlike most insects in temperate climes, honey bees do not die off in the winter and rely on eggs laid in summer to continue the population. They essentially hibernate, surrounding the Queen and vibrating to increase the temperature inside the hive to a whopping 93 degrees Fahrenheit. Their production of honey is solely for the purpose of surviving this winter, and feeding the larva, though harvesting honey is a bonus to any beekeepers out there.
Honey is really just an afterthought to all the good honey bees do for humans and the environment as a whole. Each hive of honey bees collects and redistributes an estimated sum of 66 pounds of pollen a year. One hive. In one year. They are truly our best pollinators and we should really be writing more songs about them. Their monetary value to us is in the upper billions of dollars, if any grubby corporations are reading and wish to know why they should be saving the bees too.
Products We Only Have Because of Honey Bees: Honey
Beeswax (lots of use in the lotion, salve, and cosmetic industry, particularly the organic ones)
Pollen health supplements
Prepolis (also a health supplement and used in cosmetics)
Bitchin' written works by Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca, Erasmus and Shakespeare.
An insect model used for philosophical works about ourselves, as in Marx and Tolstoy.
Heraldic symbols used by Napoleon and the Barberini.
This adorable thing:
Unfortunately for us and the bees, honey bees are currently threatened by
CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder, most likely caused by newer pesticide "innovations" used on industrial scale crops and various other poisonous chemicals we are releasing into our environment. Since 2007 North America's honey bee colonies have seen up to 70% die-offs, ridiculously high numbers. Considering that if they die, we die too, more should be done to clean up our act and reduce the use of deadly poisons that could be adversely affecting our only reliable source of fruit, vegetable and grain pollination... not ASAP, but
STAT.
This is a medical emergency, after all.
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