19. Animal Senses
Honey Bees
I can think of nothing about honey bees that is not fascinating. Of the 20,000 known species of bees, honey bees make up only eight. They are found in almost all climate-friendly regions of the planet, and much of that range is because humans have moved them there for the many benefits of this creature.
They are eusocial creatures living in colonies, sometimes called superorganisms, controlled by a queen. The colony has up to a thousand male drones born from unfertilized eggs and tens of thousands of female workers born from fertilized eggs. The females are genuine workers. When young, they care for the larvae, feeding them the royal jelly they produce and pollen and honey. They keep the hive fastidiously clean, and all the bees poop outside the hive except the queen, who is busy laying 3,000 eggs a day. As the females mature, they change to jobs such as hive\cell building, guard duty, and finally, living out their lives as foragers. On a single foraging trip (beating her wings at 200 times a second), she may visit 50-100 flowers and make about eight daily trips ranging from half a mile to three miles — busy as a bee. The worker bees live from six weeks to six months.
Male drone honey bees play a limited role in the hive’s life, but an essential one. Very lucky(?) ones fertilize the virgin queen. But other than that, not much. They do no foraging, but young females feed them nectar. Drones do no work other than help regulate the temperature of the hive. If they get that one in thousands chance to mate, they die immediately as the queen rips their genitals from their body as she flies away. Their average lifespan is between 30 and 55 days, and the drones left in hive in the fall are kicked out to prepare for the more challenging conditions of winter. This minimal role of males in these super-sophisticated colonies may have significantly contributed to their success.
When a new queen is needed for the hive, the nurse workers feed female larvae only royal jelly, and the larvae develop into a queen. The virgin queen takes flight to find a place of drone congregation area where thousands, up to 20,000, males from many colonies are waiting for her. She mates with 10-20 drones and returns to the hive with enough sperm to last a lifetime. The average lifespan of a queen is two to three years.
Bees’ senses are finely tuned. They have two large compound eyes with thousands of lenses and three ocelli eyes with single lenses. Their color range is similar to humans’, slightly shifting to orange through ultraviolet. The ocelli eyes are found between the eyes and process polarized light and patterns assisting the bee’s navigation. They process visual information five times faster than humans and have excellent color and shape memories. They have a good sense of taste with taste sensilla, nerve cells, on their antennae, legs, and mouthparts. Their tactile sense is found all over the body and also concentrated in the antennae, playing an essential role in the darkness of the hive. Related to the tactile is the honey bee’s sense of “hearing.” They hear through vibrations at low frequencies. Their premiere sense is smell — olfactory. It is 100 times better than humans and is primary in communication and social order. So sensitive is their smell that bees have been trained to detect cancer cells. The queen’s pheromones do much to control the social order and tasks of the hive. However, the five senses were not adequate for the bees’ needs. They can also sense the earth’s magnetic field and some electrical fields, which give them knowledge of changes in the weather. The magnetic sense helps them navigate foraging and properly orient their hives.
A wonderful example of a fusing of these magnificent senses is the “waggle dance.” When a foraging bee has located a good source of food, she may return to hive and share its direction, how far away it is, and what quality it is. It does so in the dark of the hive, dancing in the dark, so visual information is not paramount. The bee dances in a figure-eight formation with waggling (twerking) movements at points in the figure, making a map of the food source. Other bees huddle around and absorb the information through vibration, sound, touch, pheromones, and some think magnetic information. To test this, scientists glued magnets to the bees’ abdomens and set them out after a dance. Sure enough, the bees were disoriented, or maybe they were just pissed because someone glued a magnet on them.
The above is the tip of the iceberg about honey bees. They are true wonders.
Mark W McGinnis 