Every Day Is Special: Honeybees
They are indispensable to our food supply, live in highly organized societies and, according to Albert Einstein, if they leave us, mankind will be extinct within four years.
Honeybees are honored annually on World Honey Bee Day, the third Saturday of August.
Honeybees live in astoundingly organized colonies, with the typical hive consisting of 60,000 to 80,000 bees during the summer. The hive is ruled by one queen who regulates the hive’s behavior by releasing various pheromones from her glands.
A new generation of bees starts when the queen leaves the hive for a one- or two-day “mating flight,” during which she mates midair with 12 to 20 drones.
Upon her return, she lays 2,000 to 2,500 eggs a day and chooses which to fertilize. Fertilized eggs become female worker bees; unfertilized ones (200 to 300 per hive) become male drones.
Worker bees begin their life of toil by cleaning the hive and feeding larvae. Then they build honeycomb cells and seal cracks in the hive, receive nectar and pollen from foragers, station themselves throughout the hive and beat their wings to cool the colony, guard the hive from intruders and forage for pollen.
Drones, on the other hand, spend their lives on standby, waiting to mate with a virgin queen. To trim the ranks for winter, drones are expelled from the nest and left to die in the cold.
Honeybees survive the winter by clustering around the queen bee in the hive’s center, vibrating their bodies to generate warmth. They maintain the queen at 81 to 93 degrees no matter the weather outside.
The workers rotate inward through the cluster so no bee gets too cold. The edge of the cluster stays about 46 to 48 degrees.
In 2006, a worrisome number of honeybees suddenly and mysterious disappeared. The cause of the so-called “colony collapse disorder” has vexed scientists, but the likeliest candidate is an infectious paralytic virus found in 83 percent of the affected hives.
The virus disorients the bees in flight and they die away from the hive.
No effective preventative countermeasures have yet been developed, but bee scientists (called apiologists or melittologists) are working to find an answer.
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