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Harris County Beekeepers Association |
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The Workers The life of a worker bee in the Northern states, where winters are cold, may be six to eight months, extending over the less active season of the year—fall, winter and early spring. But a worker bee hatched just at the honey-gathering season in summer is likely to |
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The City the Bees Live In A colony of bees is a little city in itself. It has regular streets and alleys for the passage of its citizens and those streets are kept clean. In some respect it is like mankind; but in another sense it is organized on a different idea that has for its goal the survival of the fittest. The bee city is air cooled, or more exactly “air-conditioned”, in hot weather. The temperature inside is always the same no matter how oppressively hot it is outside. It is thought that for thousands of years bees have known the science of ventilation and air conditioning. |
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In the bee city there is no mayor or city manager, no city council, no political boss and while there is a queen she does not direct its policies nor its destinies. Nevertheless in all the realm of nature there is not a more efficient community. Its police force is the best in the world—not for regulating the members of the city, but to keep out the robbers, smugglers, and trespassers. Let one of these approach the gates of the city, and, be it the foreign intruder or one of its own kind, he or she will be so severely attacked that they will withdraw in utter defeat. The inhabitants are all for one and one for all. There is perfect cooperation and unity of action. There are no jealousies, no political favors, no unions, and no strikes. They do not fight among themselves. They are intensely patriotic and if need be will fight their enemies. Their courage is not questioned by any living thing that creeps, walks, or flies. Even man has a most wholesome respect for them. Their system of dividing up the jobs is the best in the world. Every worker knows her precise task and does it without being told or shown by a superior, for there is no superior. In this bee city there is no employment problem, nor is there any old age pension. However, this is not needed. The bee city carefully regulates its working force to the seasons and the amount of work to be done. When depression or bad season comes the bee city reduces its population. When there is danger of the city starving the control bees will dump the half-grown infants (bees in the larval form) out of the city gate to perish. If any of the full grown youngsters are cripples, sick, or not fully developed, they too, are removed from the city. In addition to all this, the old workers whose wings are worn out by toil are made to leave also. If they do not go voluntarily they are forcefully evicted. “What’s the use,”, they say, “of raising a lot of babies and keeping a lot of old folks or cripples that can’t work anymore?” To feed the unborn and those that can’t work might mean that all would starve. Everyone works but father (the drone), and even he is ruthlessly put out when his services are no longer needed. If the queen does not rule or boss, what does she do? She lays all of the eggs, one or two thousand a day, and if she falls down on the job she, too, is ousted and another takes her place. The slogan is efficiency. If you don’t work or can’t keep up your end of the job in the bee city you shall not eat and so the crippled and inefficient must die that others may live. This in short, is the political economy of the bee city. In some respects it may be rivaled by man. In others it is too cruel and heartless. Meet the folks in the bee city There are 30,000 to 75,000 residents in the bee city known as a “colony”, the number depending on the time of the year. Role of the Queen Normally thee is but one queen bee in a colony or city. As a rule, two queen bees do not get along peaceably in the same city at the same time. One usually kills the other. Queen mother and queen daughter may live peaceably together for some weeks; but never two daughters. When two queen bees start fighting they not only try to sting each other, but they will put each other’s hair in an unladylike fashion. The queen stings only a rival queen. A queen bee can lay her own weight in eggs in one day. She will lay, in the first two months in the spring from 300 to 1,000 eggs in a day; and in the next month, or just before the main honey flow, she may lay 2,000 eggs a day. She can be the mother of 75,000 workers (undeveloped females) in one beehive. Thus, a queen may be the mother of one half million children during her life. If the old bees did not die off at the age of a month or six weeks in the height of the honey flow, she might have twice that number. The same egg that will produce a queen will produce a worker bee in 21 days. The larva of the worker bee is fed a coarser food by the nurse bees in the hive and for that reason it is not developed into a perfect female like the queen and not so quickly. In this way the bees can of their own will produce either a queen or a worker bee from one and the same egg. |
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wear out its wings and life in a few weeks of the intense work of filling the hive with honey. It often falls exhausted outside the hive and there dies. If it does not leave the hive the younger bees push it out of the hive as it is no further use. If the old bees attempt to go back the young ones without gratitude or conscience, pick them up, carry them on the wing perhaps a mile and then drop them. They can’t walk back; they can’t fly back, and so they die. The bees that gather the surplus crop of honey do not eat it. The bees that eat it did not gather it because the generations change so easily. But the colony lives on. The same rule applies in the human family. A Drone has no father A drone, which is a male bee, has no father; but strange to say, he always has a grandfather (a maternal grandfather). The queen bee lays an unfertilized egg to produce a drone—a clear case of parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. The drone bee is not permitted by the worker bees to ever live more than one summer season. He is a happy loafer, never working, always fed by others, a regular “man about town”, until fall comes—then suddenly nobody cares for father. The drones are always starved by the bees themselves after the main honey flow unless the hive is queenless or has an unmated queen. Bees must fly three times around the world to collect a pound of honey Actual weightings have shown that it takes about 20,000 bees to bring in a pound of nectar, which will make about one-fourth as much honey. It would, therefore, take 80,000 bees to bring in enough nectar, when evaporated and modified by bees, to equal a pound of honey. It has been estimated that it takes 80,000 bees to evaporate and modify four pounds of nectar into honey. According to these figures it takes 160,00 bees to gather and prepare a pound of honey for human consumption. The average flying distance for a bee-load may be a mile and a half. If one bee could gather enough nectar (four pounds) to make one pound of honey it would have to make 80,000 trips of one mile each or fly a distance equal to more than three times around the globe. The sweet found in flowers is not honey, but similar to sweetened water. It is called nectar. Honey is the nectar of flowers, gathered, evaporated, and modified by bees. Nectar, or the sweet as it is found in the flowers, is chemically the same as cane sugar, but when the bees store it in their combs and seal it over, it is converted into real honey, consisting of what is known as inverted sugar, or about equal parts of laevulose and dextrose, which means that it is in such a form that it can be absorbed without change in the human system. Honey is much the same as sugar that is found in most fruits. It contains laevulose and dextrose, mineral elements such as iron, lime, sodium, sulphur, magnesia, and phosphoric acid, so necessary to our human bodies. Refined cane sugar has none of these elements; and if any of them were present originally, they would be lost in refining. Before cane sugar can be absorbed into the human body it must be inverted by the digestive process into a sugar like honey. |
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