By Beatrice Hawkins
This morning, since the rain, many bees were busy on the lavender bushes in my garden.
They are an amazing insect and so vital to every aspect of our food production and life.
Albert Einstein is reported to have said that if bees died, out human life on this planet would cease in 4 years.
They are the only insect that produces food eaten by man, and this is the only insect-created food, and has therapeutic, medicinal, nutritional and cosmetic value.
It is the only food that contains everything necessary for life. It contains necessary enzymes, minerals, vitamins and water and also an antioxidant called “pinocembrin” that is found in no other food and is associated with improved brain function.
“Unique among all God’s creatures, only the honey bee improves the environment and preys not on other species” Royden Brown.
Each hive has its own unique smell so that the bees can identify it. Their sense of smell is so acute that they can differentiate hundreds of different flower scents and also tell if the particular flower carries pollen or nectar from metres away. A bee visits between 50 and 100 flowers per collection trip from the hive. They have 170 odour receptors whereas mosquitoes have 79 and fruit flies only 62. Try as I might, I can’t find a reason for the existence of either of these pests!
A bee’s wings stroke about 200 beats per second and this is what makes the buzzing sound associated with them. They can fly at up to 15 miles per hour and as far as 6 miles in their quest for pollen.
An average worker bee will only produce 1/2 of a teaspoon of honey in her life span of 122 to 152 days. A hive of bees will fly approximately 90,000 miles to produce 1 kg of honey. This is the equivalent of 3 times around the world. It takes 28gms of honey to fuel one bee’s flight around the world. So when you enjoy that honey in your tea or on your toast, it may only be a teaspoon of sweetness for you, but for a bee, it is more than a lifetime of work!!
The worker bees also produce the beeswax to form the hive and 6 to 8 lbs of honey is ingested to produce 1lb of beeswax. While it has been proposed since 36BC that honeycomb was the most practical structure around, it has now become the content of a 19-page mathematical thesis by Thomas Hales proving that, of all possible structures, honeycomb uses the least amount of wax. Honeycomb is the most efficient structure in nature and the walls meet at a precise 120-degree angle producing a perfect hexagon.
The bee’s brain is oval and about the same size as a sesame seed. It has, in this tiny space, a remarkable capacity to learn and make complex calculations retime and distance travelled when foraging. They are also capable of transferring this information to the other bees in the hive.
Bees use the sun as a compass but on cloudy days have a backup plan. They are able to navigate by polarised light using special photoreceptors to locate the sun’s place in the sky. And all this is in a brain the size of a sesame seed?!
A hive usually consists of between 20,000 and 60,000 workers, all female!, and 1 queen. While the workers only live less than 6 months in the cooler weather and about 6 weeks in the busy time, literally working themselves to death, the queen can live up to 5 years. Her sole role is to fill the hive with eggs. She can lay up to 2,500 eggs per day. Each hive contains some male bees, drones, larger than the workers and with no stinger and whose only purpose is to mate with the queen. During the winter the bees survive on the honey they have stored during the summer and form tight clusters in cold weather to keep themselves and the queen warm. It is not uncommon as winter approaches and food becomes scarce, for the worker bees to force the drones from the hive!
The large storybook bumblebees that I first saw in Tasmania many years ago, are not nearly as productive as the regular honey bee and have a much shorter life span.
The tiny native bees and the blue striped bees that I see in my garden are at the other end of the size spectrum and a delight to watch as they zoom around.
Unfortunately, our bee population is on the decline because of the use of pesticides and the fact that gardeners do not now grow as many flowers as previously! With the size of house blocks declining and the fact that, because of work commitments, people have less time to spend in gardens and also because of the trend to easy-care, architectural gardens, urban spaces are becoming less attractive to these busy creatures.
While it’s not a problem at the moment with all the wonderful rain we’ve had, remember to have water sources for them as the weather heats up. If you see a swarm, don’t worry and don’t panic!. They are just shifting home and will relocate within about 24 hours. If you want to be really kind to them, fill a shallow container with a sugar-water solution so they can replenish their energy and move on.
So be kind to our bees, they are among the most important creatures on earth. They pollinate over 80% of all flowering plants including 70 of the top 100 human food crops.
1 in 3 bites of food eaten by humans are from plants pollinated by bees. Plant things that are attractive to them and be careful using sprays and chemicals that may harm them because just maybe, Einstein was right!
