The buzz about bees
They’re the darlings of countless news stories, the stars of old
sketches on
”
Saturday Night Live
”
and the faceless workers driving California’s dominant economic
engine. They’re immigrants to North America, but they’ve become so
entwined in our society that most people probably think of them as
natives.
They’re honeybees, and they’re under attack.
The buzz about bees
They’re the darlings of countless news stories, the stars of old sketches on “Saturday Night Live” and the faceless workers driving California’s dominant economic engine. They’re immigrants to North America, but they’ve become so entwined in our society that most people probably think of them as natives.
They’re honeybees, and they’re under attack.
First, it was the menace of “killer bees” that threatened the North American population. African bees introduced to Brazil were thought to be a productive addition to the landscape. Instead, they proved to be aggressive defenders of their hives and unproductive as honey producers. They began hybridizing with honey bees and the population spread northward toward the U.S.
Then tiny parasites became a problem, demanding that beekeepers manage hives in new ways to keep their populations vital.
Now it is a mysterious illness that is responsible for the loss of tens of thousands of colonies across the country.
Colony Collapse Disorder is still not understood, but to commercial beekeepers, some of whom have lost 50 percent of their hives, the whys of the disease take a back seat to the economic chaos left in its wake.
Like ants and termites, honeybees are colonial insects. While each bee is certainly an individual, a hive might also be thought of as a single organism.
The hive has only one set of working ovaries, housed in the queen bee. Most of the bees we see toiling away are worker bees, sterile females. Each hive also houses a few idle males – drones – who exist to fertilize a queen.
The architecture of a bee hive is marvelous. Wax combs, divided into perfectly symmetrical hexagons, fill every nook.
As kids, quite a few wild hives were around. One persisted for years in an enormous aging tree next to the practice tee at Bolado Park. We did what any little boys would do when confronted with thousands (a colony through the summer months may contain 60,000 individuals) of venomous insects.
We threw rocks at it.
For this and a host of other reasons, I can only attribute our ascent into adulthood to a serendipitous combination of providence and dumb luck.
While wild honeybee populations are down due to disease and parasitism, some still persist locally.
I’ve been watching one of them for some years. The hive was located in an aging elm tree, located next to an abandoned cabin in the northernmost reaches of San Benito County. The tree blew over a few years ago, shattering the cabin as it fell. The bees had been entering and exiting their colony through a small hole in the tree, located about eight feet above the ground. When the tree toppled, the entrance to the hive was left a few inches above the ground, and the contents of the hive were turned on end. But the colony persisted, adapting to its abrupt rearrangement without seeming incident.
Most school kids can tell you all about how bees communicate through elaborate dances.
