bluehoneysugar's Journal

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

May 31st, 2012 3:20PM-3:40PM

Many of the hives are owned by Evan Sugden, a beekeeper and a part-time entomology professor who was mentioned in the journal entry "Bees." There are several hives at the UW farm that is operated by the Bee Committee. Because the bee committee is a student led organization, student interns are held responsible for taking care of the honeybees.

During our tour, there happened to be a student intern taking care of the bees. It was a great timing for the tour to prove that bees didn't attack even when a person stuck his hand in the hive with just a beekeeping glove. Chimera and I had a little conversation with the intern, who I failed to ask his name, about what he was doing during our tour. He opened the hive for us to peek at the bottle of sugar water placed upside down so that osmosis allowed for gradual leakage of food source for the bees. Apparently, bees do not have to travel outside because of the sugar water readily available for them and the intern told us that that is one of the ways to mitigate loss of number of bees.

In a sense, the VIP treatment of the bees make it seem like they are spoiled; the bees already have their home and food available for them. If the bees should think about swarming when the population gets too large, they have a vacant housing awaiting them, although the intern told me that swarming rarely occurs. I believe this just comes to show how important honeybees are to the industry and the economy. Honey is a magical food that never rots and a precious source of nutrients like minerals and vitamins. Bees mean a lot to us now, and it seems like we made them dependent on us, too. According to the intern, honeybees rarely goes far to forage (because food is in their house) and they rarely sting even when he sticks his bare hand in the nest. During the tour I talked about how honeybees have been tamed to produce more honey while being less aggressive; I thought I found a great example there.

At this point, I am proud to say that I was standing right by the entrance of bee hive, in the midst of hundreds of honeybees. It will sound odd, but they looked adorable with small and fuzzy bodies and not showing even a hint of hospitality towards me. Occasionally, some individual bees stopped and rested at my legs, and whether a sign of friendship or taste of curiosity, the sight of bees on my body without any pain eased the last bit of discomfort I had with them.

May 31st, 2012 1:45PM-2:30 PM

The day is not cold but not warm either. Full cloud cover gives makes the day the ordinary Pacific Northwest weather, but luckily there is no precipitation. Almost no wind. The squirrels group are taking the class on a tour with activities in and outdoor, ranging from Mary Gates hall to Grieg Garden.

From the first day I arrived on University of Washington campus, I knew that squirrels were going to be a big part of my college life. Now that might be an exaggeration, but it is true that I was enlightened to see so many of them having to come from a city where I am not so sure most people have seen a wild squirrel. In fact, there are so many squirrels that I think if time comes to switch the UW mascot from huskies, we might as well become the UW gray squirrels.

The primary aspect of any squirrel that fascinates me is their capability to climb vertical slope of a tree bark. The agility of squirrels are incredible, especially the speed at which they climb up a tree. Their sharp claws seem to be helping them with the process, but if their claws are so sharp 1) how come there are no claw marks left on the bark of the trees? and 2) are their claws not damaged by walking on pavements and other artificial surfaces? The squirrels group have pointed out that squirrels might have a hard time climbing smooth barks. This is an interesting point; all the trees that I have seen squirrels climb have rough barks such as giant sequoia and pine trees - I have yet to see one climb up a birch. Discovering whether squirrels are capable of climbing up smooth bark trees may ultimately come down to play a part in habitat conservation measurements.

From their appearance, squirrels are adorable species. One of my friend mentioned that they shouldn't be as cute because squirrels dig into a garbage can for food. My friend's point - leaving aside the subjective argument of whether species that dive themselves into a garbage can is cute or not - reveals the trait that these squirrels are quite smart and can flexibly adapt to their surrounding environments. However, their intelligence does not stop there because eastern gray squirrels are capable of storing their food. In other words, eastern gray squirrels are capable of performing both spatial and temporal analysis to base their foraging behaviors. It certainly takes skill to develop a temporal mindset; animals like sheep I do not believe are capable of such abilities to store food. I have been wondering why I see squirrels during winter for a long time, but it is the storage of food allows the eastern gray squirrels to overwinter without hibernating.

Eastern gray squirrels are known to store their food in a tiny hole that they dig, which inevitably means that they have some source of guidance that allows them to remember the location of the holes. It seems like the mainstream hypothesis is that squirrels rely on scent of pheromone, but it could be pure memory. What is incredible is that squirrels dig several small holes to minimize the risk of the hole being dug up and precious food source stolen. Some squirrels have even been observed to fake digging a hole especially when they sense other squirrels watching them. This means, that in addition to spatial and temporal thinking, eastern gray squirrels could calculate risks as well. By using a huge tract of land as their territory, they manage to avoid the catastrophic situation of what happens to humans when houses get broken into.
I wonder if squirrels would fake digging a hole if species other than squirrels, like myself, observed them long enough. We could translate this situation into ours, of which situation we could imagine an animal staring into our house, directly at a refrigerator. If it is a duck or sheep peeking, then I would not bother whereas if it is a bear or a monkey, I would be concerned that bears and monkeys would be too strong or too smart to do anything about it if they truly decide to take food from a refrigerator. So my hypothesis rests upon that squirrel's decision to fake a hole depends on what species are staring at them.

Finally, it seems to be that the eastern gray squirrels are the only squirrels found on campus, and to me they look like a typical squirrel that pops up in children's picture book. It is a shame that eastern grays are driving the western counterparts to limited habitat. Since the eastern grays are the only species of squirrels that I know, whatever behavior of them becomes the behavior of all squirrel species in my mind. Because I know that is not true, watching the western grays might strike as a revelation.

Species List

Sciurus carolinensis - Eastern gray squirrel
Sciurus griseus - Western gray squirrel
Sequoiadendron giganteum - Giant sequioa