An UnBeeLievably Fun Fact
Syed Adil recently wrote a fantastic post about ants. Ants are undoubtedly amazing and underappreciated. This got me thinking about another amazing insect out there that we should all learn more about:
The bee. There are some interesting similarities between bees and ants. Like ants, bees are on all continents except Antarctica and have been around for about 100 million years. They are also great navigators using their amazing sense of smell — each hive and individual bee has a distinctive smell, and bees can smell all different types of flowers and know how much nectar and pollen they have. Other than that, bees are capable of using sunlight to navigate, polarized light if it’s a cloudy day, and even earth’s magnetic field if they need to.
Like ants, bees are hardwired to do specific jobs. There are bees that scout for new food, bees that defend the hive, and bees that remove dead bees from the hive. These are all worker bees, which are all female. The larger male bees are incapable of stinging, and all they do is chill in the hive and mate. Worker bees’ jobs are determined by their age, but they can trick their brains and bodies into thinking they’re younger than they are if they need to perform a different job.
Queen bees don’t live quite as long as queen ants — a measly 5 years. They can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day in the busiest times of the year. The queen bee can decide how many male and female bees they have based on what the hive needs. She stores sperm and then fertilizes as many eggs as she would like to be male, and the rest are female.
Like ants, bees work really hard. The average nectar and pollen collecting bee creates only 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her life. That means that it takes a hive a combined 90,000 miles in the air to create a kilogram of honey. Sidenote — honey is the only food produced by insects that is eaten by humans, and it is the only food that has everything we need to survive (vitamins, minerals, water, enzymes, and antioxidants). Also, it is estimated that 1/3 of our food supply relies on on pollination by the birds and the bees (and the bats), but mostly the bees.
Bees are clearly pretty important, which is why we should be worried that over half of the 1,400 species are declining, and almost a quarter are at risk of extinction. This is due to pesticide usage and global warming. Let’s plz not gg the bees.
Ants are pretty smart, but bees could give them a run for their money. They are the only insect ever known to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem, which is basically the question of how to visit all points of interest and return to the starting point in the shortest route. This is pretty impressive considering a bee can visit up to 100 flowers on a single trip. We are all familiar with the honeycomb pattern they use to build their hives, which is the most efficient use of material according to this 19-page math proof.
Bees communicate with a dance, called the waggle dance. Bees that have found a food source use this dance to tell other bees where the food is and convince them to come help grab some grub. This is a figure 8 with three components. First, the waggle. The intensity with which the bee waggles portrays how good of a food source it is. The more nectar and pollen, the more waggle. Second, the length of the waggle. Don’t confuse this with intensity, this it the physical distance over which the bee waggles. Lastly, the direction. If the waggle is happening straight up and down (relative to the orientation of the hive), then the food is in the direction of the sun. If the bee deviates from this angle, the food is at an angle from the sun similar to the angle between the waggle direction and the top of the hive.
You could have a bunch of different bees that have found food in different places all doing their dance, trying to convince other bees to come help get the food.
Still need to be convinced that bees are smart? They can teach and learn, just like ants. Researchers in London taught bees to pull a string if they want food, which the bees were then able to teach other bees how to do. The same university then taught bees to roll a ball into a “goal” to receive food, a much more difficult tasks for bees. See the video below to see these impressive feats.
That’s about all of the similarities I could come up with, so here are some other random tidbits:
Bees don’t always die when they sting, humans just happen to have skin, clothing, etc. that snags the stinger so that it detaches from the bee and pulls some innards along with it.
Normal bees live anywhere from a few weeks during the busy season to several months in the slower parts of the year.
Bees are more likely to return to flowers laced with caffeine (which can occur naturally) because they are more likely to remember where the flowers are. On the other hand, researchers have found that cocaine-laced flowers can make bees overzealous and incorrectly describe the location and/or quality of the flowers during its wiggle dance, making them hard to find.
Bees are like serial killers — they do their work close to home, but not in the immediate area. Serial killers do this so neighbors won’t get suspicious, and studying bees has helped improve algorithms to find killers.
Bees appearances are a evolutionary tool — used to mimic bad tasting bugs and ward off potential predators. Other bugs that don’t have stingers and can’t defend themselves like bees then mimic bees to scare off predators. The bee orchid has a bulb that looks like a bee, which bees are then more likely to visit, leading to increased pollination of the flower.
Scientists are trying to create drones that can pollinate flowers just in case we have a mass extinction of bees.
