Day 37.

Let me finish this discussion with one last example from my past. Did you know that even the common honeybee, without even trying, upsets the conclusions of brilliant minds? Bees on occasion have upset me. In my farming days I was twice chased by angry bees, I’m sure I set Olympic records, but alas there were no witnesses. I even got stung under the eye once by a revengeful kumakazi bee after we had robbed their hives of honey.

That did not stop me, however, marveling at the incredible architectural ability of these dynamic insects. The beehive is a masterpiece of engineering! There you find multiple rows of six sided rooms with walls of wax. This honeycomb marble palace is built by young bees who haven’t reached the age of 17 (days), yet each room is identical with three pairs of walls facing each other. Walls that are less than a quarter of a millimetre thick. How did the honeybee know that a hexagon is the smallest circumference and therefore would take the smallest amount of building material? How did they know this would be the strongest yet most economical plan? Who told these 17-day-old little creatures? It wasn’t me! What’s more they do it without complaining, you never hear of bees striking for shorter flowers or more honey!

How they learnt how to build is a marvel, but how they find honey and pollen is even more wonderful! As a bee flies out in the morning to search the fields and gardens, they are a marvellously equipped, fantastically engineered flying machine.

Man-made freight planes can carry 25% of their weight but the bee can carry 100%, without propellers or jets. They store their cargo in three places. The nectar is stored in a tank in the body and the pollen is stored in two baskets on the hind legs. The bee stops this from blowing away by moistening, pressing it together and tamping it down evenly on each leg. It does all this while hovering in mid air or while hanging by one claw.

The bees have some sort of internal clock that tells them exactly what time the nectar will be available at its source. When I was farming I knew that bees would not touch the clover until after 10:00am, because the nectar would not be available until then. But what fascinates me most is their navigational and communication equipment. If the bee returns with nectar from near by flowers the other bees are able to fly directly to the source by smell. If the flowers are several kilometres away they engage in a kind of “waggle dance.” while handing out samples to get the others excited. Then they dance through a figure 8 configuration. The angle of the dance down the vertical comb represents the horizontal direction of the food source with respect to the direction of the sun. The number of dances per minute indicates the distance of the source. The only problem is the number is in reverse ratio to the distance i.e. the further away the source the smaller number of rounds e.g: if the bee does 10 rounds in 15 seconds the source is only 100 meters away, but if it does 2 rounds in 15 seconds the source is 6 kilometres away. To make matters worse the calculation is not arithmetic but logarithmic. I can remember working with logarithmic tables from a book when I was at school and I can just imagine the bees with there little logarithmic table books trying to work out the source and direction.