Four things I’ve learnt about honey bees

Recently, I signed up for a beekeeping course because I want to know how I can help the bees. You might have heard that they are dying out.

Unfortunately, my course got canceled before I go into the practical parts of keeping bees. But I did learn some very cool facts about bees that’s definitely worth sharing

1. The flappy insect
Honey bees can flap their wings more than 200 times per second. 200 flaps in one blink of the eye. Doesn’t that sounds amazingly cool?

I found it even cooler that they flap their wings to adjust the temperature of their hives. By creating air flows, they can heat up or cool down their hive to the ideal temperature all year around. So when you pay for both central heating and air conditioning, the bees just move their wings really fast.

2. They like to dance
They do waggle dance to communicate with their hive mates about a new source of food, for example. They make a series of zig-zag moves to indicate the direction of the food source in line with the sun. Pretty clever, I would say. And it is really fun to watch.

3. An orderly society
A colony of bees includes a queen, a dozen drones and many many workers. They all have their tasks and their destiny.

99% of a bee colony are worker bees. They live for about a month (or more in the winter), and basically work themselves to death. Worker bees take care of many things, from household stuff (like nursing the baby and cleaning around the hive) to more “manly” tasks like guarding the door or collecting food and building honey comb. Remember that they are all girls!

There are male bees, too. They are the drones. But they don’t do any of the above tasks. So when food is scarce in the winter, drones often get kicked out of the hive. No contribution, no rent. Harsh, isn’t it? So make yourselves useful, folks.

You would ask what do drones do. Actually, their only job is to mate with a queen when she is out on a mating flight in the summer. However, they die right after the act. Again, it seems to me that drones have it pretty rough.

Every colony has a queen who bosses others around to tend to her needs and the one of her babies. She mates only once with a few drones, and will be fertile for life, which can last from three to five years. During her life, she keeps laying eggs to establish and expand the colony. A queen can lay up to 2000 eggs per day. Hardly any sex and a lot of births. I am not sure that I envy the queen much if at all.

4. Their food and our food

Honey bees feed on pollen and nectar from flowers and trees. Pollen is used as food to feed the young, while nectar will be processed to make honey for winter storage.

While bees take pollen and nectar from plants, they do give something back. They pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons and broccoli. Some crops, like cherries, are 90-percent dependent on honey bee pollination. I was told the story of bee keepers who move their many bee colonies across the States every March – almond bloom time because almonds depend entirely on the honey bee for pollination.

Plants actually love bees. They create a special range of colours in their flowers, that visible to bees (but not human). Recognising the colours, bees know exactly where to land, get the pollen and do the deed of pollinating for fruits. 

But bees are dying out because of the heavily use of pesticides and the out-of-control parasites. Some cold-hearted optimists say we should not worry about pollination. There will be more robots to do it instead of the bees. Or just very cheap labour for now.

But the bees are such amazing creatures. They are more than their work of pollination. They are more than their possession of honey. They fly around on sunny day, making that lively buzzing noise. They can teach us a lot about hard work, orderliness and sacrifice. And they are so cute when they dance.