Bee tour
May 31st, 2012 2:30PM - 3:20 PM
It is already the final day of the fifth month of the year. At this point I'm not so sure whether I have not slept in every other day because I still write march instead of may for the month. If my mind is truly lagging, sometimes I fill in 2011 for the year. But the truth is out in the spring weather that is about to mature into summer. Although the day is quite gloomy like the typical winter Pacific Northwest weather, temperature is just about right to be wearing a t-shirt and something over it.
Is June really approaching, though? I still don't buy the argument; it cannot be the end of May already - I was going to study Portuguese, improve my guitar skills, and become a decent chef according to my new year's resolution, and none of these have been executed quite as well as I was hoping. Perhaps today is just an oddly warm day.
Despite my fierce struggle to go back in time, there is another evidence of spring on the University of Washington campus. If you are familiar to the campus at all, then you would know the UW farm, and possibly the bee hives kept for beekeeping. Make a visit and you would fine honeybees actively engaged in nectar collecting. You may have heard that spring is the season for insects (or something along the line) and bees are no exception. Only social bees can overwinter (see "Bees" entry for details on solitary and social bees) but even then, honeybees and bumblebees are vulnerable against cold; they can only maintain warmth owing to the honey production that creates heat. Back in April when we made a visit, hardly any bees were to be seen in the pouring rain that made me want to stay inside. Today was also a gloomy day, but those bees were cheerfully going about their business. For some reason, the sight of hard working bees carrying out their tasks made me happy. I'm glad they like what they are doing.
By this time I have accepted the fact that today was the day before June, and there is good reason for it. Bees are not only hardworking but also intelligent species - the type of species that would earn straight As if they were human students. Bees learn and they learn very efficiently to get to the food source more efficiently. Bees have a variety of learning methods; one of them involves memorizing colors. Bees cannot quite see the red end of the spectrum but they can see ultraviolet (so you can think that bees can detect shorter wavelengths than humans can). With time constraints, bees have an incentive to forage at flowers that provide them with the most reward. Flowers are colorful to attract their pollinators and thus bees memorize the color of the flower that they like. When they find a good foraging site, social bees engrave the location in their mind relative to their nest. Bees would then go back and communicate their share of information with their peers in the form of what humans see as a dance. Here's where it gets complicated because bees communicate the distance and direction of the type of their dance (waggling and circling) and the angle relative to the sun. Bees incorporate the sun because their nests are seldom parallel to the ground, creating the need to use the sun as a reference for the correct direction. I'm not quite sure what this means, but it ultimately indicates that bees have accurate internal compass, biological clock, and memory. Even in days like today with thick cloud cover, they trust the UV rays to detect where the sun is. So if they are out foraging, they convince me that it is that time of the year. Sailors used the sun and the moon to guide them? No big deal, the bees can easily do that and make a dance out of it.
Being smart also saves their lives, sometimes. Worker bees have to be productive in food collection since foraging time is limited, especially so if weather is not cooperating. They have got to be aggressive in their processes; they do not get quite the luxury to ponder about where to go and which flowers to choose. For this reason, bees don't mind humans (and us) standing around their bee hives - they are too busy to mind our presence (although several people seemed to be at discomfort standing near beehives). It is interesting to note that the monster that takes advantage of the bees' rush for time is the flower crab spider. Flower crab spiders are intriguing monsters that ambush for prey in or near flower by shifting its body color to the color of the flower! I have tried looking for them near the beehives but they were either not present or were camouflaging too well for me to spot. Some crab spiders would eat bees when bees dive into the flower. Research published in the Science News called "Robot Spiders vs. Bees" indicated that bees soon learn from their traumatic experience, giving a little more time to examine before they dive into a flower. The fight against crab spiders and bees is one of the natural survival scenes that I wish to observe one day.
After standing beside the beehive for an hour, I felt much more comfortable with the bees. I have mentioned that bees do not care about humans over their tasks, but this has been easier to say than take in. I have gotten stung by a bee in second grade and there is still a mark in my hand. Since then, I have learned not to mess with bees like how bees learn not to deal with crab spiders. Learning about bees have helped me overcome my shunning away from them; it has given me a sense of accomplishment similar to when I overcame the distaste for tomatoes.
Species List
genus Apis - Honeybee
genus Bombus - Bumblebee
family Thomisidae - Crab spider
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