The Humble Honeybee

Honeybees are incomparable little creatures. Allow me to tell you why: Honeybees and humans share many things in common: we socialize, dance, eat honey, touch, feel, mimic one another, sleep, enjoy nicotine, caffeine, vote and we both get sick. After a queen honeybee lays a couple million eggs, she begins to produce fewer pheromones (or chemical scents), which cause the worker bees to feed half a dozen larvae royal jelly or pure protein as they begin rearing a new queen. It’s up to the scout bees to locate a new site to move the existing queen and thousands of workers to create with their beeswax a new hive. The bees reach a consensus on a new location by voting. Research has shown that 15 is the crucial number of scout bees for a quorum. Then they wait for the signal to evacuate. Are you like me and millions of other people who find our morning caffeine buzz irresistible? Well – we’re not alone – our friends the honeybees also seek a morning buzz from flowers containing nectar laced with caffeine. That caffeine boosts the bees’ memories causing the buzzed forager bees, returning to the hive, to dance vigorously and communicate to other bees the precise location of the caffeinated flowers. It seems that some plants have evolved an ingenious mechanism of using caffeine as a drug to get the upper hand on the bees to pollinate their flowers first. Not only do bees pollinate 75 percent of all the world’s food crops, but also all the cotton we wear. Honeybees produce ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news