Honey bees are some of the most industrious insects on the planet. With pollination, responsible for various crop yields and floral reproduction, they sustain large portions of the food market.
Some bees even work themselves to death - Mental Floss reports that in colder weather, worker bees can live as long as nine months, but in the summertime, when they're working non-stop and at full capacity, "they rarely last longer than six weeks."
Here are just a few amazing things bees can do:
1. Pollination
According to the American Beekeeping Federation (ABF), honey bees are responsible for contributing $20 billion - yes, with a b - "to the value of U.S. crop production." In fact, honey bees are also responsible for pollinating apples, cranberries, melons, and broccoli. Almonds, for example, depend on honey bees for 100 percent of their pollination.
ABF notes that California depends on nearly 1.8 million out the approximate 2.7 million bee colonies in the U.S. to pollinate a million acres of almond orchards. The New Agriculturist reports that "bees pollinate about one-sixth of the world's flowering plant species and some 400 of its agricultural plants."
If a plant isn't properly pollinated, it produced substandard fruits which affect seed yields, availability, and ultimately, the price of food.
2. Honey Production
Bees have a symbiotic relationship with the flowers they pollinate. The flowers give the bees food in the form of nectar and the bees in turn, help the flowers reproduce by spreading their pollen. The honey-making process is involved and takes a lot of work.First, bees absorb nectar from flowers and store it in an extra stomach called a 'crop.'
According to Live Science, "while sloshing around in the crop, the nectar mixes with enzymes that transform its chemical composition and pH, making it more suitable for long-term storage." When a bee get back to its hive, it regurgitates the crop nectar into the mouth of another bee and that bee will do the same with another in the colony until the nectar is placed in a honeycomb.
Here, the nectar begins the process of water evaporation - a chore the bees are also responsible for by beating their wings to get rid of excess water in the nectar. After this, bees harden the nectar into wax using fluid secreted from their abdomens. As long as the wax is kept tucked away from air and water, it will stay edible indefinitely - or at least 3,000 years, like the ancient honey discovered in King Tut's tomb.
3. Well-Developed Hierarchy
The queen bee is the largest in the colony - she is the only bee within an entire colony that lays eggs, therefore, everything revolves around her.
The queen's primary responsibility is egg-laying, which she does by utilizing sperm stored in her spermatheca from her mating sessions. The stored sperm will last for the duration of the queen's life.
Worker bees will create 'queen cups' which are portions of the hive in which the queen will lay eggs for future queens to come from. Once new queen eggs have been laid, the current queen takes about half the colony with her to settle into a new location in a process called swarming. Once the queen leaves the old hive, she will not return to the old one.
Queen bees are savages - the first to hatch in the old colony can choose to take some of the bees in the hive with her and swarm a new location that will become their permanent home or decide to stay in their birth hive and kill her sisters before they hatch so she has no competition. If two queens are born around the same time, they fight to the death and the survivor becomes queen by default.
4. Bees Remember Faces
The New York Times reports that bees are able to recognize human faces via configural processing - a method of putting a face together similar to completing a puzzle and forming a complete image. This is also the way humans recognize each other.
Researchers from the University de Toulouse in France found that bees were able to distinguish human faces by flying around an image of one and learn the "configuration" of that face.
"Bees were able to learn the face images, not because they know what a face is but because they had learned the relative arrangement and order of the features," said the researchers in a study published in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
5. Incredible Wings
The characteristic buzzing sound associated with bees is produced by their wings which beat at an astounding 12,000+ times per minute - upwards of 230 beats per second.
Bees have four wings in total, two on each side of their body, which are held together by hamuli - ridges that fit together like teeth to help the wings stick to each other.
In fact, Live Science reports that bees move their wings so fast, that "studying them, even seeing them, has proved difficult." Bee wings can move the incredible little critters at a speed of 15 mph.
6. Honey Helped Create Our Brains
Bees are the only insect that produce food consumed by humans, per the Ontario Beekeepers Association.
Humans have been consuming bee honey for at least 9,000 years, and the Smithsonian reports that "energy-rich honey may have helped hominids evolve big brains." The brain needs fuel, and honey is rich in fat, glucose, vitamins, and minerals.
Bees also show up in Egyptian hieroglyphics that go back to 2400 B.C.E.; Science writes that some ancient rock art "appears to show people gathering honey" and adds that evidence from fragments of clay pots may indicate Neolithic farmers might've used beeswax to waterproof those pots or possibly used honey to sweeten food.
7. Mathematical Geniuses
If it wasn't already evident, bees are smart. Just how smart? They're kind of mathematical geniuses.
The Royal Holloway University in London discovered that bees have solved the 'the traveling salesman problem' by discerning the shortest distance possible between pollination stops in order to save time and energy. Currently, bees are the only known animals able to solve this problem.
Bees are also clever builders. Due to their shape, honeycombs are incredibly efficient and use the least amount of wax. Thomas Hales, an American mathematician actually created a proof showing that honeycombs are the most efficient structures in nature.
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