Theatre of Creation #1: Honeybee
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Hey there!, and assalamualaikum. So this is a new series where i'll be talking about the mystifying, marvelous, magnificent world of animals. Each entry will focus on one animal. Simple? Alright, let's begin!
*plays series theme song even though i have no theme song*
Today we're talking bout a little guy, known as the honeybee. What do we know? Well they're tiny, have killer stingers, and are responsible for making honey for us fellow humans. And if you're a millennial, well then you may have gotten your bee knowledge from *shudders*.....Bee Movie.
But today, we're gonna dive into their world, see what's really going on, and just how intricate their lives are. So as the old saying goes "Ladies first"
The Lady Bees
If you've seen a bee, it's probably a lady bee. Female bees are known as worker bees. Why? Cuz they do EVERYTHING. They forage for food, buzzing from flower to flower, sucking up sugary nectar with their long tubular tongues.
They build the hive using beeswax and teamwork.
They regulate the temperature in the hive by beating their wings.
They clean the hive in this crazy amazing way which i'll explain later.
They defend the hive from foreign intruders, and guard their beloved queen.
So yeah, it's like a mini-Themyscira except they don't have armour, they can fly,
and....everyone's Wonder Woman.
Oh here's something awesome i wanna show you:
So in the Quran (Surah Nahl: 68), there's a verse about Allah giving the bees divine instruction. Arabic is a language that has grammatical gender, which means a word has two forms, male and female. Notice that the words used in the verse are Feminine.
For the word "eat": "Kuli" is for females; "Kul" is for males. The Quran used "Kuli" (females).
For the word "follow a path": "Usluki" is for females; "Usluk" is for males. The Quran used "Usluki" (females).
For the word "their bellies": "butuniha" is for females; "butunihim" is for males. The Quran used "butuniha" (females).
Butuniha بُطُونِهَا in Arabic means multiple stomachs of a single female. Today we know that a honey bee has an extra stomach dedicated for honey. All this revealed in the Quran, over 1400 years ago. Awesome sauce.
The Queen Bee
How come there's only one special bee that's called the Queen Bee? How do they decide which bee gets to become Queen? Well, there's something important ya gotta know first.
Queen Bees are made, not born
When the Queen Bee dies, or is getting too old for her job, Worker Bees will start feeding the Bee Larvae something called Royal Jelly. They make this special sumptuous goo from a gland in their heads, and it's pretty much digested pollen, honey or nectar, proteins, hormones, and more. For a long time, it was thought that Royal Jelly was what transformed normal bees into Queen Bees, but it's what's not in Royal Jelly that makes the difference.
Worker Bees get fed normal food, which has this RNA. Think of RNA as instructions for what genes are gonna be formed. Now this normal food will slow the growth of the bees, and make them infertile. Royal Jelly doesn't have this, so Queen Bees become larger, and have the ability to reproduce.
After a few days, less and less larvae are fed Royal Jelly, and the other larvae get fed normal food. Once the first queen bee emerges, the queen will search and destroy other ‘still-developing’ queen bees in their honeycombs. If more than one queen emerges, they will fight each other to the death till only one Queen remains……..we so need a Bee Movie 2.
The queen's job is simple, to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive's next generation of bees. Another cool thing about Queens is that they can actually command the hive by making different combinations of pheromones (chemicals that can stimulate other creatures to do things). For example, a Queen is always surrounded by her "court." These bees act as her body guards. They form a circle around her with all their heads pointing towards her. They walk backwards so that their heads are always pointing towards the queen.
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| They protec |
The Male Bees
Uhhh how do i put this. Ok first of all Male Bees are known as drones, and well...they kind of err...suck. Not really, but compared to the other bees y'know. Okay okay, so they don't have stingers, but are still larger than the female bees. Drones only have one function, and that is to mate with the Queen, and then die.
Tough life.
How do they make honey?
Alright here’s how they do it. Worker bees go out and find flowers. Once they find a good site, they go back to the hive and tell the other bees the location of the site, by….wait for it. Dancing
Ok, maybe not like that.
Yes, the bees perform specific dances to tell the other workers how far the flowers are so that they can successfully go and extract all the sugary goodness without getting lost. When they have a full load, they return to the hive. There, they pass the nectar to other worker bees for them to chew it. After gradually doing this, the nectar turns into honey! But it’s still very dilute.
In fact, 70% of it is still water, while honey is supposed to have less than 19% water. So the workers puke in a special enzyme called invertase, to make it last longer. And by long, I mean “the only food on Earth that can’t expire” long. After that, they store the dilute honey in some honeycomb cells. The workers then fan the honey with their wings to make it dry, and get the evaporation going. When it’s finally ready, they seal the cell with a wax lid to keep it nice and clean.
But ya gotta have specific temperature to store honey, so on hot days, bees ventilate the hive by clinging on to a wall, and beating their wings. It's also a cool fact that bees always produce more honey than they need. Why you ask? Bees, like other animals, always produce extra for us humans, just like how chickens lay at least one egg a day, and how cows produce much more milk than it's offspring needs. So next time your cat-like instinct tells ya to swat a bee, thank em for being so thoughtful instead.
Why Hexagons?
Yes, the bees perform specific dances to tell the other workers how far the flowers are so that they can successfully go and extract all the sugary goodness without getting lost. When they have a full load, they return to the hive. There, they pass the nectar to other worker bees for them to chew it. After gradually doing this, the nectar turns into honey! But it’s still very dilute.
In fact, 70% of it is still water, while honey is supposed to have less than 19% water. So the workers puke in a special enzyme called invertase, to make it last longer. And by long, I mean “the only food on Earth that can’t expire” long. After that, they store the dilute honey in some honeycomb cells. The workers then fan the honey with their wings to make it dry, and get the evaporation going. When it’s finally ready, they seal the cell with a wax lid to keep it nice and clean.
But ya gotta have specific temperature to store honey, so on hot days, bees ventilate the hive by clinging on to a wall, and beating their wings. It's also a cool fact that bees always produce more honey than they need. Why you ask? Bees, like other animals, always produce extra for us humans, just like how chickens lay at least one egg a day, and how cows produce much more milk than it's offspring needs. So next time your cat-like instinct tells ya to swat a bee, thank em for being so thoughtful instead.
And has subjected to you all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth; it is all as a favour and kindness from Him. Verily, in it are signs for a people who think deeply.
(Surah al-Jathiyah : 13)
Why Hexagons?
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| Cc: Milos Milanovic
How do you divide a volume into equal size, using the least resources? Squares? Sounds like it could work. Circles? Well circles would leave gaps. Hexagons?
For thousands of years, mathematicians have been looking for the answer. It actually has a name, this problem. It's called the Honeycomb Conjecture. Only recently did we manage to prove, through stacks of complex equations that the hexagon is in fact the most efficient shape. Here's one of those pages:
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Hexagons let you hold the most amount of something using the least amount of stuff. We use it in a lot of our buildings, bridges, and cars as well. Yup, what humans took thousands of years to figure out, bees already did. It's also a wonder how they can build such identical hexagons too.
Bee Hospital?
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| Cc: Nicholas Huber |
When your house has a lot of holes in it, nasty stuff's bound to intrude. Luckily, bees have this amazing health system to make sure no one gets sick, and well...die. It's Propolis. "Excuse me?"
Yeah, it's this stuff that's made from tree sap and buds. Bees use it to fix cracks, repair the hive, etcetera.
But propolis, does WAY more than that. It was only recently discovered that bees sterilise the hive using propolis, giving them a kind of "social immunity". Propolis has wicked antimicrobial properties. It can fight parasites, prevents colds, stops herpes by stoping HSVs from reproducing, and even combats cancer by acting as an anti-tumour agent!
One cool thing bees do though, is when they manage to kill an intruder and it dies inside of their hive, they usually carry it outside to dispose the corpse. But if the poor cadaver is too big to carry, say...a mouse, the bees will use propolis to embalm it, so that when it rots, the bacteria won't spread. Talk about immaculate.
So how do bees know that a dead body causes bacteria production, and embalming it with this propolis thing will stop it? In fact, how do they even make a substance so powerful, that even chemists in decked-out laboratories find difficult to make?
Rainbow Bees
Alright, that's it for this entry. Big thanks for reading this far. I hope with this, you'll realise that bees are just one of the things we don't even pay a glance at, and yet, they're one of the most complex and beautiful creatures ever. I'm gonna end off by showing you some Bee subspecies. Yes dear reader, they don't only come in Yellow :) Until next time!
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| (not sure) |
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| (also not sure) |
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| This cute fellow is the Blue Orchard Bee, even though he's not that blue haha |
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| This guy's an Orchard Bee. |
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| This weird guy's the Pure Augochlora |
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