About Bees

20,000 to 60,000 Apis Mellifera honey bees live in a single hive, the queen bee lays about 1,500 eggs a day and lives up to 2 years. The drone bee has no stinger, has a lifespan of 24 days and his only job is to mate with the queen bee.

The queen has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day. Despite having tiny brains, honey bees display honed cognitive abilities and learn to associate a flower's color, shape and scent with food, which increases its foraging ability.

Bees must collect nectar from two million
flowers to make a one-pound comb of honey.

A hive temperature need to be regulated between 32 to 36 degrees Celsius and it is maintain by the workers bee by fanning their wings if the air is too hot or cluster together to generate warmth--as an overall respond.

Each individual Apis Mellifera worker bee have its own thermostat that tells it when to start fanning--meaning that all of them don't do it at the same time to prevent the hive from swing between too hot or too cold--therefore maintaining optimum temperature.

All Apis Mellifera worker bees or drones are sterile females that live for about six weeks and work themselves to death, collecting pollen and nectar. Worker bees can fly at speed of 24 km/h (15 mph) up to 14 km (9 miles) to find pollen and nectar.

Bees are not as busy as they are made out to be. The insects sleep 80% of the night and spend long "nap" periods resting their wings during the day doing nothing much.

Individual Apis Mellifera bee have sleep phase and don't fly about all the time doing work--it is not that bees are lazy--just that they are very efficient, highly intelligence with advanced memory skills and the ability to learn quickly.

Apis Mellifera honey bees, at any particular stage in its life has a specific job to do and if they are unable to that job--they conserve their energy by doing nothing. Each bee has a unit of life energy and the faster it works, the faster it dies, and are highly intelligent by doing nothing uneconomical.

White color trumpet shape desert rose flower

The Adenium obesum or "Desert Rose" is an extraordinary tropical succulent plant originates in:

East Africa, are native to arid areas of Sudan, Yemen, Socotra , Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe regions including Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda where it rains frequently in the summer, but is very dry in winter.

Pink color trumpet shape Adenium obesum
The 'obesum' name refers to the large
water storage fat root base of the plant.

Coercion, not altruism, is what keep Apis Mellifera workers bees from reproducing. Worker bees share food with their nest-mates and collectively raise their colonies' young. Rank and file workers, who are the queen's daughters, usually don't lay eggs, even though they have ovaries.

"A typical Apis Mellifera honey bee society is not an obliging commune--on the contrary--it resembles a miniature dictatorship. Outside the royal chamber, reproduction is forbidden, and unauthorized eggs are terminated--its kind of a police state, really."--Said; Tom Wenseleers of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium

In 1989, Francis Ratnieks of the University of
Sheffield in England discovered that honeybee workers eat each other's eggs.

Recently examined policing patterns that honeybees, loyal workers assist the queen by eating the eggs of insubordinate workers who attempted to spawn and such egg-killing behavior called policing, said; "postdoctoral student"--Ratnieks and Wenseleers

And no fewer than one honeybee in a thousand lay eggs and nearly all get killed in honeybee hives--the researchers reported in the "journal Nature".

"Egg-killing helps to retain the reproductive monopoly of the queen, if there is a very high probability of workers' eggs being killed then there's not much point in them laying the eggs in the first place. In effect, enforce a sort of zero offspring policy. That manipulation explains why most honeybee workers essentially abandon any design on bearing off-springs", Wenseleers said.

"Apis Mellifera honey bees voluntary altruism is not really voluntary. If  voluntary altruism drove workers to favor their kin's welfare over their own propagation, then closely related workers would be more cooperative than ones who weren't related....

....We actually find the reverse, the less closely related, the more cooperative they are, the more altruistic honeybees are only about 30% related to one another--this suggests that altruism is not based on family ties", Wenseleers said.

"It's based on social coercion. Some individuals are manipulating the options that other individuals have, for workers deprived of the chance to reproduce, helping their mother and sisters is their best shot at perpetuating their genes", commented David Queller, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University in Houston.

"This lesson might have implications for human societies--cooperation is possible even among genetically unrelated strangers, on the other hand, the lesson shouldn't be taken too literally.  A society where everyone is very cooperative out of fear for being punished is not the sort of society you would want to live in", Wenseleers said. 2006 National Geographic Society.

Why do flowers have scents?
Scent is a chemical signal that attracts pollinators to a particular flower in search of nectar or pollen, or both.

The volatile organic compounds emitted play a prominent role in the localization and selection of blossoms by insects, especially moth-pollinated flowers, which are detected and visited at night.

Species pollinated by bees and butterflies have sweet perfumes, whereas those pollinated by beetles have strong musty, spicy or fruity smells.

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Gardenias and orange blossoms both smell terrific, but when placed together in the same bouquet, they will neutralize each other's odor and there will be no smell at all.
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To date, little is know about how insects respond to the individual chemical components, but it is clear that they are capable of distinguishing among complex aroma mixtures.

In addition to attracting insects and guiding them to food resources within the bloom, floral volatiles are essential for insects to discriminate among plant types and even among individual flowers of a single species.

For example, closely related plant species that rely on different types of insects for pollination produce different odors, reflecting the olfactory sensitivities or preferences of the pollinators.

By providing species specific signals, the fragrances facilitate an insect's ability to learn particular food sources, thereby increasing its foraging efficiency. At the same time, successful pollen transfer (thus sexual reproduction) is ensured, benefiting the plants.
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Despite having tiny brains, Apis Mellifera honey bees display honed cognitive abilities and learn to associate a flower's color, shape and scent with food, which increases its foraging ability.
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Scent outputs tend to be at the highest levels only when the flowers are ready for pollination and when potential pollinators are active.

Bees and butterflies tend to plants that maximize their output during the day, whereas flowers that release their fragrance mostly at night are visited by nocturnal pollinators like moths and bats.

During development, recently opened young buds, which are not ready to function as pollen donors, produce fewer odors and are less appealing to pollinators.

Once a flower has been sufficiently fertilized, its bouquets are again reduced, encouraging insects to select other blossoms.

Red color trumpet shape Adenium obesum
desert rose flowers.

Why not Google Adenium obesum
desert rose flowers or Apis Mellifera
honey bees for more interesting topics?

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Acknowledgment, source of information for Why do flowers have no scents? 2005 Scientific American. Natalia Dudareva, associate professor in the department of hoticulture and landscape architecture at Purdue University. Acknowledgment, source of information. The Star, 16 Oct.2005 page 40 Sci-Tech

Acknowledgment, source of information for Bees. Glyn Davies, President of the British BeeKeepers Association. Bee Wilson, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine's, England
Xenophon, Virgil and Shakespeare's Henry V, Archbishop of Canterbury. Paul Theroux, Novelist, travel writer and part-time beekeeper with 85 hives each containing 30,000 bees in Hawaii and Neurobiologist, Prof Randolf Menzel, Berlin University (Germany) have studied bees for 40 years.Ben Harder, 12th Nov 2006 SundayStar page 35 Sci-Tech National Geographic Society 2006 "journal Nature". David Queller evolutionary biologist at Rice University in Houston. "Postdoctoral student" Ratnieks and Tom Wenseleers of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Genome code of honey bee--Reuters--SundayStar 29th Oct.2006 page 38 Sci-Tech.