We want to keep bee boxes at the campus..to do this we needed to know a lot about bees – we realize we hardly know anything about them. An hour session withGuru was enough to wonder about bees. Guru is pioneer in bee keeping…hope to have some bee boxes at the campus soon!
We know bees for honey or sting. We also know that they have a queen bee and others are workers bees.
But we may not know that there are solitary bees who lives for self and social bees who live for self as well others.
We know that they pollinate but we may not know that they do 96% of the pollination. We also may not know that they are the reasons for most of our crops and vegetables. They can make out instinctly which part of the pollen to take (ripen) and where exactly ( female) to transfer.
We may know that there are worker bees and queen bee but we may not know that there are drone bees also. We may know that queen bee lay the eggs, but we may not know that they lay eggs when they are asked by worker bees. They lay eggs very meticulously and put in each honeycomb. We may know that being Queen is exciting, but we may not know that they don’t have any power and only lay eggs and are driven by the needs of the worker bees.l We may know that worker bees do all the work, but we may not know that queen bees depends on worker bees for even feeding food and producing royal jelly as their food for their survival.
While being “worker bee” sounds work and hard work, but we may not know that work brings power of controlling the life of the entire hive. They are intelligent, they know how to control the population, how to control food for queen bee or where to find female part of the flower, when to ask queen to lay eggs or when to stop feeding queen and so on. Queen bee can lay eggs (15,000), but worker bees decide how many! They control the working of hive but they never sleeps to ensure they feed the larvas. Life span is 42 days, works for 21days at home ( in the hive). They know when to fly out for the food and where to come back. When to control the population of Drone, when to create queen bee, or to guard the hive. We may know that they buzz, but we not know that communication happens through smell (ferromone) signals and unique to that hive.
Ah! Each world is wonderful.
Thank you Guru and Prashanth to introduce us to this wornderful side of Bees.