How many bees does it take to make a jar of honey?
Every spoonful of honey we slurp is the lifetime’s work of a dozen foraging bees. A jar takes up to 1000 bees. Between them they have visited around 1,500,000 blossoms.
All those workers are infertile females. Females do all the nursery work and housekeeping. They build the honeycomb cells, seal the queen’s supply of fertilised eggs in them, look after the pupae, clear out the deceased, fan the air to keep a constant temperature. The few males tolerated in a colony just hang around doing not much until they get their chance for a life-terminating fling with the queen.
Many of those female workers graduate to foraging. In a 5-6 week lifetime each of these will fly around 50 miles, visit 1500-2000 blossoms and in total collect just 4 grams of nectar. That’s why 800-1000 bees are needed to gather the 3400g of nectar that the colony then evaporates down to the 12oz/340 g of honey in our jar.
Enjoy the results of all this teamwork!
Bees understand distance and direction
Bees can estimate distances
When preparing to build honeycomb frames, bees can team up, link legs and estimate the distance available. We call this ‘Scalloping’. Teamwork!
Bees can signal distance and direction
When a returning worker bee has found a new source of nectar she uses a ‘waggle’ dance to let her co-workers know as they crowd round. She communicates direction (angle of the waggle run shows the destination angle to the sun) and distance (level of excitement). Teamwork! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ijI-g4jHg
Where did bees come from?
Around 130 million years ago the world was home to carnivorous, scavenging wasps, doing their bit to clean up the carcasses of dead animals like dinosaurs. Then some plants started to develop flowers with attractive nectar to attract help with pollination. Some of those wasps responded, mutated, changed to a vegetarian diet. They were the first bees. They evolved in partnership with flowering plants from that beginning.
Our own ancestors? At this time we were scurrying about in the undergrowth, small rat-like creatures.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-beguiling-history-of-bees-excerpt/
Nature’s Survivors
Catastrophe! 66 million years ago (20 times longer ago than our early ancestors first walked upright) a 10km wide asteroid slammed into earth. The impact was equivalent to 7 billion Hiroshima bombs. For years the skies were blackened with debris. That triggered a mass extinction of many plant species, most herbivores and hence carnivores. Apart from a few small flying species, dinosaurs became extinct. But the partnership with bees gave their host flowering plants an edge. Together they survived this cataclysmic climate disruption.
Since then bees have gone on working in concert with nature, evolving, adapting and surviving, even through the last ice age which saw off wooly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. Bees are nature’s big survivors. There are some lessons for us here.
Bees today. Still adapting, still thriving.
Each of the world’s 8 species of honeybee have adapted to the flowering plants in their local habitat. Here are three of them:
Our familiar Western Honeybee, Apis Mellifera, has evolved to survive our annual winters. This was Brother Adam’s start point when he bred the world famous mite-resistant, placid and productive Buckfast Bee.
The East African Lowland Honeybee, Apis Mellifera Scutellata, copes with the hot and dry savannah. Having evolved to compete for scarce food sources, these have a reputation for aggression.
The East African Mountain Honeybee, Apis Mellifera Monticola, tolerates the cool of higher altitudes, thriving on highland plants.
Scutellata and Monticola honeybees inhabit overlapping areas. Colonies of both can be found in BzB apiaries
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/54026
