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| 4:38 a.m.-2004-08-21 I'm just one of those lucky people who find themselves laying awake at night, thinking about the oddities of the world. Tonight, it was bee reproduction. Yeah. Mostly, my curiosity about bees has been limited to 'how fast can I run away from this sucker, anyway?' bee-cause I'm one of those folks that just seems to get stung. Bees (and wasps and scorpions and ants and other unpleasant, stinging things) seem to go out of their way to come and sting ME. Thank goodness I'm either not allergic, or I've built up a tolerence. Tonight, I'm worried about how all-female civilizations get along. Well, that, and why the honey on the shelf in the funny looking little bear tasted different from the honey I've been getting (Grade A All American Honey). Turned out, the honey I got this last time was imported. From Viet Nam. I had a snack, and went back to bed. And couldn't turn off my brain. I started worrying about bees. I mean. Bees have always sort of weirded me out. A population of amazon warriors cum flower nibblers. I started thinking about what I knew about bees. And it could be summed up as such: Bees drink nectar, which they somehow magically transform into honey. They live in hives, are ruled by queens, and have no need for males. Seemed pretty simple. But, spurred on by why the honey might taste different if it was from Viet Nam, I had to get up and look it up. Turns out, bees are NOT all-female civilizations, as popular wisdom would have you believe. There are males, called 'drones'...and they lay around the hive all spring and summer, eating, and waiting for the 'girl next door' to mature so they can go out in a blaze of glory. That's right. They lay around, eating all they want, watching their sisters do all the work, getting fat and sassy, till that special day when they notice the debutants of other local hives out for a good time. They take off, leave home, do the horizontal lambada once, and they're done. If they're not lucky enough to do catch the girl of their dreams the one time she puts out (for them anyway, seems a newly formed queen mates with as many males as she can before she settles down to lay a colony), when fall comes along, their sisters catch them, rip their wings off (or something else unpleasant) and toss them out to starve. The new queen goes off, finds a likely spot, gathers pollen on her own, constructs a few 'honeycomb' cells, lays her first clutch of eggs, and waits about two weeks, while she plays single mother for the first and only time in her life. Then her first daughters hatch, and start helping mom around the house. Freed up from the duties of maternal bliss, the young queen will now spend the next several years lording over her self-made empire, while her daughters do all the hard work. She stays barefoot and pregnant, pumping out as many as several hundred eggs a day. And that, you think, would be that. But it's not. You see, the worker bees are kept in a sort of prepubescent state by their mothers (and we won't go THERE, exactly), by way of her powerful arsenal of pheramones. These keep the worker bees' ovaries from developing, so they concentrate on being working women, instead of cozying up with their lazy brothers and half brothers. Oh, that's right. Remember how queens mate with as many males as they can? It seems that's to keep the hive healthy. One of the tasks of a worker bee is to help regulate the temperature of the hive with her sisters. When not out foraging for food, they hang around, buzzing. Literally. The workers use their wings to help circulate air in the hive, keeping it a nice, comfortable temperature. Well, I guess some bee scientists, curious as to why queens preferred to be loose women in their early years, made sure that some queens only mated with one male (via artificial insemination, it turns out...how the heck they managed that, I do not want to know...scientists tend to be bored folks, I think). Well, it turned out that those worker bees who were all from the same dad all started or stopped flapping their wings at the same temperature...so the temperature of the hive sort of roller-coastered, and their little siblings to bee (excuse the pun) didn't develop as well. Bees who come from several different dads have their thermostats set at slightly different temperatures, so they start and stop fanning when the mercury hits different points. This keeps the air circulated and a more constant temperature. Smart critters, these bees. Makes you appreciate honey more now, doesn't it? Anyhow, some bees, as they get older (most worker bees only live 6 weeks, due to the hard work of flying literally thousands of miles to collect pollen), manage to slip the surly bonds of their monther's hormonal hijinx, and develop functioning ovaries. Of course, they're not going out on the town to slut around, so they have to be content to produce eggs that are haploid, and thus, only male. So if they were allowed to develop, these would produce more useless worker males. So their sisters, in a case of tough love, destroy the eggs and keep on going like nothing happened, because you know, who needs a bunch of useless mouths hanging around, eating up the profits, cluttering up the hive, and not pulling their own weight? But bees don't seem to hold a grudge, and the wanna-bee queens are seemingly left alone to live out their beeish lives, so long as they also go out and work. Oh yes, bees don't get to be 'hes' and 'shes' the way us mammals do. A bee is the sum of her mother and father's genetic material (diploid, this is called, and I'll let you guys go look up the technical terms), having two complete sets of chromosomes to help spread the genetic wealth. A drone, though, only gets his good looks from mum (1n). Since worker bees don't mate, any potential offspring they would have would be male (1n) and useless. Since there's a good chance that any given drone is probably going to wind up mating with one of his sisters (yeah, yeah, I said the bee next door, but you know, I was trying to be polite), it would be pointless for worker bees to produce offspring. Enough of her brothers are going to be after any given new queen anyway. Fascinating, and too Freudian for me to go any further into. So it seems a simple, tidy life. Queen bees mate once, lay a few eggs to get some help around the house, then spend the rest of their days laying more eggs, and occasionally moving the hive around. Worker bees take care of the eggs, make the honeycomb, fly around pollinating our plants (and that is a Very Important Job...those scientists have determined that if there were no bees, we'd lose most of our food crops. That would be Bad (tm)), and making honey, which is really just a small part of the important service they render us humans for essentially free. So the next time you see a bee, say 'thank you', and then quickly move along. She's got a lot of weight on her shoulders. Which reminds me. They say that aerodynamically a bee shouldn't be able to fly at all. So add that to the list of things they're doing; confounding the laws of physics! Then again, things are never as simple as they seem. Remember that whole mating social structure up there? It seems that a bee species in South Africa has figured out how to get around the whole 'one queen, one hive' theory. Not the Africanized honeybees of South American fame, but a whole 'nother ball of wax. Occasionally workers from these so-called Cape bees will sneak away from home, find a hive full of another sort of bee, and take up residence. Somehow, they're able to evade the 'early warning' system most bees have, that make them throw out invaders from other hives. Then, away from their mother's overbearing hormones, they develop ovaries, and start laying eggs. And the darned clever things have even figured out a way to produce viable diploid (2n) eggs! Without a male! They start making 'I'm laying eggs' hormones, and voila...they are pseudoqueens, laying eggs and living the high life among a family they've only sort of married into. Some will even kill the reigning queen, usurp her hive, and eventually overpopulate her new dive with too many unworking drones...sort of a ghetto-i-zation of the new hive. Without their rightful ruler's benign and enlightented dictatorship, the hive slowly withers and dies. Needless to say, this has sort of upset the honey-making applecart of South Africa, and it seems to be a big problem. One hopes these naughty bees never make it to North America. The Africanized Honey Bees should be warning enough, that you shouldn't start moving bees from one area to another, willy nilly. But Africanized Honey Bees are a subject of perhaps another entry (but I doubt it, by now I've probably lost most of my readers anyway). Of course, this entire post was researched, and I'd be a naughty monkey not to acknowledge the research of others that I read, when I was trying to figure out why the honey in my shelf, imported from Viet Nam, tasted different. Not bad. Just different. It wasn't just that the flowers in Viet Nam are different. It's that the /bees/ are different (whole different species), one, or two, or three of just 20,000 or so different sorts of bees. Bees, you see, have been around a while. In fact, only 500 or so species are 'social', and make their hives from wax. The other sorts of bees are solitary, or semi social, and nest in the ground, or plant stems, or even the hives of other bees. Some plaster, some burrow, some mine, some mason, and some cut leaves. The first bees were around at least 200 million years ago, and are actually related to a diverse bunch called the Hymenoptera, which includes wasps, yellow jackets, muddaubers, ants, and other assorted (usually) flying, stinging, biting, oft-times social-cooperative inclined critters. In short, a lot of other people did the research I was happily able to browse upon, to get more information about these strange flying wonders that mankind has somewhat allied himself to, the bees. I'm grateful, because I would've never been able to even begin to find the right books to read, to learn more. If I've gone a bit wrong, well...I'm no apiculturist, nor do I plan to become one. I'd probably be as good at bees as I am about plants...cats, no problem. Dogs, no problem. Plants? I'm a black thumb, and that's a completely different topic. So without further ado, here are many of the rest of the websites (and the one book) I consulted for this information, in no particular order. The others are found in the various links in the entry above. My thanks goes all 'round. Waiting For Aphrodite by Sue Hubble, who also wrote A Country Year University Of California, Berkeley Museum of Paleontology Online American Beekeeping Federation Apiculturally yours, The Captain
 The Internet's Mood: The Captain Recommends Dogcessorize 2006-08-13 - Movie Review: Monster House 2006-08-07 - Movie Review: The Descent 2006-06-09 - Movie Review: The Omen 2006-06-03 - She's here, She's here! 2006-05-22 - Blame the Cabin-Boy for playing 50 questions.
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