Bumble, bumble everywhere.
Especially in the warmth of late summer, it’s easy to find all sorts of honeybees (genus Apis) everywhere you go. Even a quick walk from the Pergola to Hudson Technology, it’s easy to spot quite a few of the little buzzing insects. Hardly surprising, considering the variety of local honeymakers in Frederick and the surrounding areas, including The Bee Folks, The Frederick Beekeepers Association, and Dizzy Bees. Captain John’s Honey estimates that it takes about two million trips to flowers in order to make a pound of honey, and Hood campus has a wide variety of flowers and other nectar-producing plants.
The nectar is transferred from the tongue of one bee to another, eventually evaporating into honey as the bees store it in the honeycomb of their hives. And while it is entirely possible to spend hours talking about honeymaking (and believe me, some research websites do just that), the thing that fascinates me most about bees is the comb. Made of beeswax, a product that is produced by the honeybee’s wax organ, every comb is hexagonically shaped in order to maximize space and minimize resources used. Every worker bee is automatically programmed to begin working in this manner, and even as the comb is started in a variety of different places in a hive, they always mesh up perfectly at the center. PBS’s Nature: The Silence of Bees is an awesome place to learn more about them (and where I got my information for this).
Recently, a beekeeper covered a hole in one of their hives with a bell-shaped glass jar. It seemed like an obvious and simple solution, but the unexpected and ultimately fascinating fact is that the bees decided the bell jar was part of their hive and began to build within it, showing the full comb-making process to the beekeeper and any observers.
The bees began building by making equally-spaced vertical lines of wax, and then working inwards, building the comb in their usual 45 degree angle (in order to keep honey from spilling out), and building within. The process was done with each bee working as part of a unit, until the entire bell jar was filled with comb and part of the hive system.
See the rest of the pictures here.
Kimball’s Biology states that the reason for the cooperation and the way bees communicate is through a series of dances and pheromone releases. The bees don’t naturally just know to move in, they’re spoken to by their fellow bees, and therefore they know how to work. Once the bell jar was considered part of the hive, the rest of the bees followed suit, quickly swarming the jar and getting to work on making it part of their own. What fascinates me is how mathematical it all seems, the beeswax placement and the rate at which the jar is taken over.
It’s a fascinating process, and I hope the beekeeper with the bell jar releases more information about his experiment!
At the end of my post, I mentioned a video I found while I was researching bees. I don't know about y'all, but I'm an incredibly audio learner, so I tend to find videos, documentaries, or professors who will engage my auditory senses in order to learn. And, so, I went looking for bee-related videos. What I found, I linked.
In an tangentially related note, I came across this video while researching hivemaking. The documentary presented here is similar in many ways to the Nature video above, but when the question of “how did bees learn to make hives” is presented, the answer is significantly different. What are your thoughts on religion in science?
I won't lie when I say I was pretty disgusted. It's sort of like when you're digging through the cereal in a box and discover that the prize inside is utter crap. I was 100% into that silly little documentary, and then BAM. No answers for you. I posted the last bit on the blog in hopes that some of my fellow students might agree with me (or engage me in some sort of debate), but none of them have yet. It's fairly disappointing, actually.
