BEES WILL SOON BE BUSY

The first of May brought us a warm sunny day at last. A very cool spring has kept the honeybees silent as they form a cluster around the Queen and beat their wings to keep the hive warm over winter. The Queen bee is no doubt very busy in her kitchen planning the diets for her three kinds of subjects in her hive of perhaps 50,000 worker bees. In line with their diet requirements, she lets a couple hundred eggs develop into drones, the males needed for the wedding dance. They just lay around doing nothing but waiting for the wedding ceremony. She is wise enough to keep the whole hive in control according to the kind and amount of food for each egg she lays. Laying eggs at the rate of one every minute keeps her busy indeed. All the workers are girls, and never allowed to fully mature so she can keep them happy just gathering pollen and nectar for the next winter's food supply. She keeps the germ cells from last year's wedding in a pouch in her body and releases them a few at a time. In her hive of 50,000 subjects she counts out only a couple of hundred to develop into males, the drones needed for the wedding dance.

A rich food secreted by glands in the head of an adult worker is fed to a few eggs to insure the future of the hive. After four or five years the Queen will have to give up her throne to one of them. But she doesn't give up her crown easily. She has a smooth curved stinger reserved for doing battle with a rival queen. Older and weaker, and no longer able to lay enough eggs, she will die in battle. The winner takes the crown and the new Queen controls the hive. I recall how impressed I was when I first saw a swarm of bees flying high. After the wedding the drones are no longer fed by the workers and soon die off.

This is a brief review of what is going on in Beeland as these busy insects keep our food supply intact during the summer to produce our winter's food supply. Hats off and many thanks to the bees who work so hard for our benefit. It's not an easy life for the worker bees as they sometimes face an early death coping with pesticides and other poisons released by car exhaust.