Unfortunately, pollen and nectar can not gather itself. A bee's main role is to collect all pollen and nectar that it can get and take it to the hive. This process is known as foraging. Bees are not the only ones to forage. “The Secret Foraging Behavior of Bees” has done a study of many different species foraging, and they believe that animals follow a random pattern called Levy-like. An example of Levy behavior is when an animal doesn’t know where to get food, so they randomly search. Eventually, the animal will find food. After doing more research and studies, “The Secret Foraging Behavior of Bees” found out that bees don’t fully follow the Levy-like behavior. How they figured this out is that they experimented with fake flowers covered in pollen. They placed a spider on the flower, and the bees noticed and would stay clear from the flowers that had spiders on them. This concluded that bees were not randomly avoiding flowers but staying out of danger. What the scientists found out was that the foraging process was a little more complex than random. Thanks to the bees we now know that. But even if this experiment didn’t take place, we still would have figured out that their foraging pattern is not random. Nature tries to help bees forage for pollen and nectar which we would not have found out if not for an original Netflix documentary. Flowers help in the foraging process. You might be thinking, well duh, it’s the flowers’ pollen they are collecting. Which you are not wrong, but we know that all plants give off a certain electrical sound. Hive Alive demonstrates that flowers give off a specific sound wave that tells the bees whether or not it has pollen. For a bee that is vital because it would be a waste of a bee’s time if it had to check whether or not a flower had pollen. Since the flower lets the bees know that it is not ready for picking of pollen, the bees can fly by and not waste its time. Bees try to not waste the time of their colony members either because foragers use something called a waggle dance. Waggle dance is a form of communication for the bees. The information they share is where the best flowers are. Waggle dance is a specific process. First, the bee buzzes or waggles towards a direction. The direction the bee walks is the direction in which best quality of flowers are. Waggling tells the bees how far the flowers are. If the waggling is short then the flowers are close, the longer the bee waggles the farther the distance. Letting the bees know where the flowers are speeds up the process of the other foragers to collect pollen. A bees time to forage is precious which helps when they know where to go and which flowers not to waste time with.
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Honey is one of the most pure substances that we constantly crave. “Lawyers, Guns, & Honey” explains that honey is and has always been in constant demand because it is natural and many food industries put honey in foods in exchange of sugar. Many of us believe that honey is better for our bodies than sugar is; but “Honey or Sugar” states that honey is actually contains three different types of sugar! But do really care when honey tastes so good? I know I don’t. Honey may not the healthiest thing for us but it is still all natural. How do bees make it taste so good? The process is kind of disgusting to think about, but the taste of honey is just too good to shy away from. Worker bees which are female go out to collect nectar from flowers then the bee will consume it into their stomach called “honey gut”. According to “Lawyers, Guns, & Honey”, bees add enzymes to the nectar that they had consumed and once they get to the hive they spit up the nectar and pass it off the to other bees. Those bees will do the same thing adding a little more enzymes and hand it off the another bee. The nectar typically gets passed around 3 times until the last bee stores it into a cell. Once the nectar is placed in a cell other worker bees fan the nectar and dehydrate it. This causes the nectar to harden to a thick syrup, known as honey. Workers It’s pretty common sense that the queen bee is female but what you may not have realized is that worker bees are also female. Drones are the males of the honey bees, and they do nothing when it comes to the colony. Worker bees do it all. And they are have a lot of work to do when summer comes. Unfortunately, the Bee Movie may have lend you to believe that worker bees are males but that is not true. Drones have no responsibility when it comes to the hive. The queen also has no control over what the worker bees do. The worker bees don’t have the same job when they leave their cell and when they die. Honey bees don’t live very long. According to “Colony And It’s Organization”, worker bees only live for about 6 weeks in the summer. In that time worker bees clean the cells, feed the young, care for the queen, remove debris, etc. Their jobs change by how old they are. By a certain age, worker bees will become known as field bees. Field bees adventure outside of the hive to collect pollen and nectar. A field bee typically lives up to 40 days in this last stage of its life. When I think about honeybees, I really only think about the honey that they make. But how do the bees work together and make the honey? Does the queen have any influence over the bees? But lets begin with what I do know. Everyone knows that bee colonies can’t function without their queen. And every bee has their own job to do. Thousands and thousands of bees depend on each other and most importantly on the queen. That would be pretty stressful as a queen to know that if you don’t do your job correctly you could kill your whole colony! Unfortunately, that assumption is wrong. The queen is not the ruler of the colony. Beekeeping Like A Girl explains that bee colonies are more like a democratic system. The queen doesn’t have to communicate to the hive because the functioning of the bees are due to an instinctive chemical called pheromones. Queen bees don’t really have the typical queen duties. There are different types of bees in the colony: workers, drones, and a queen. The queen mates with some drones which are male bees. An interesting fact is that she only mates once in her life. The queen can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day! She may not be the monarch of the hive, but she sure has her work cut out for her. A queen lays fertilized eggs which are worker (female) bees and unfertilized eggs which are drone bees. Most queens can lay well eggs for 3 years. When a queen bee loses the ability to properly lay eggs, the colony will put another queen in her place. What I didn’t know was that the workers make more than one queen. It makes sense now that I think about it, and it is pretty clever on their part. Unfortunately for the queens, they kill each other until one is left and that is the only time that a queen will use her stinger states BeeKeeping Like A Girl. The queen may not be the dictator of the hive, but the colony knows that the queen is a significant key to their survival. The queen has a ‘court’ of worker bees that do everything. They feed her and clean her, anything you can imagine they probably do. It is believed that if the queen didn’t have her ‘court’ of workers, she would most likely die and that is how important all the bees are to the colony. The bees have a very interesting and unique way of being able to communicate with each other. It is truly remarkable as to how they can depend on each other. Three months is a long time. Writing about one topic in that time is not going to be easy, especially if the topic I choose is something I know a lot about. At least in my opinion, the topic should be something I don’t know very much about. My fear is finding a topic that is interesting enough to write about for three months. Unfortunately, I’m very indecisive so it’s going to be hard finding something that is fascinating enough to research. For the past week or two, I have been trying to research interesting topics to learn about. I asked some people in my homeroom (band) what I may want to research or think about as my topic. Their ideas were interesting but nothing really peaked my interest, so I decided to look at some short Ted-Talks. A Ted-Talk that sounded interesting was “Why People believe they can’t draw - and how to prove they can” presented by Graham Shaw. I was intrigued because I didn’t believe just any person could draw. Before the video, I had no faith in my ability to draw anything, especially since Tessa is the artist in the family. The Ted-Talk stuck with me for awhile but I thought about having to draw almost everyday, and I don’t have any patience for drawing. Besides, I never really had the motivation to draw before, why start? I’m now back to square one. I still have no clear direction on where to go. Then I asked my mom if she had any ideas that I wouldn’t get bored with. She had recently seen a video on Facebook about bees. I remember going to a bee pollinatarium after a middle school cross country meet at U of I in Champaign. It was interesting because the Pollinatarium had a working beehive we could watch. I really wanted to find the queen. Thankfully, they marked the queen with a red dot which made it a little easier to find her. It was fascinating to see the bees working. I always thought that the bees had a chaotic order to them because they know what they have to do and somehow they never get in each other's way. I’m not going to lie; it is a little scary walking into a bee pollinatarium because seeing a bee always makes me think of being stung. They say if you don’t bother them they won’t sting you, but I have been stung just standing near a swarm of bees. The worst part about that whole situation was that I was in the middle of the Girls Golf Regional Tournament. Needless to say, I didn’t do so well on that hole. Fortunately, not all bees have a stinger. www.buzzaboutbees.net/stingless-bees.html states that honey bees, bumblebees, and carpenter bees can’t sting. Bees are not a very common topic, but I want to learn more about them. I’m not quite sure what path this blog is going to go. However, I’m excited to learn and become more knowledgeable in order to help people understand how bees are essential to life. |
AuthorHello, My name is Emma Meiss. I'm a senior at Dunlap High School. This second semester I will be writing about the importance of bees. ArchivesCategories |