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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
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. |
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.
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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 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? 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. ----------------------------------------- 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. 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. |
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 |
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