The life and times of worker bees Part 2 The Ottoman Empire

The next stage in a worker bee’s life is guarding the hive. They also take on the task of receiving pollen and nectar from foraging bees. The society of bees is both highly structured and well functioning. Even the occasional palace revolution is embedded into the structure of perpetual order. Few societies both in the animal and human world are like that. Most societies thrive on chaos both from within and from without. The Ottoman Empire is the only society comparable to that of the bees, to my mind. As in the hive in Ottoman society everybody knew his/her place and thrived in it. Individuality was not encouraged and justice didn’t mean in fairness and reasonability but in stability without change. No wonder the Empire lasted 450 years and only came to grief when the chaos around could no longer be kept out. The photo I took in 1966 in the Central Taurus Mountains of Turkey, home ground of the erstwhile Ottomans and famous for it’s honey. On a plateau stand about a hundred hives close together.

The life and times of worker bees Part 1 Carers

Worker bees, not surprisingly, do the work to keep the hive healthy and happy. As Timothy the beekeeper said: bees are stupid but the hive or colony is intelligent. And well organized. Worker bees don’t all do all the work all of the time. Worker bees start their working lives feeding the queen and larvae and doing cleaning duties. For the purpose they have Royal Jelly producing glands. But when they get older and the glands stop functioning they build comb cells for the eggs to be laid in. Photo Amanda Stevens

Drones and queens

The queen will fly out on a sunny day to the congregation area and mate with many drones. When she enters the mating zone a cloud of drones will follow her till one gets so close he can move over her flying body and grab on to her. The mating lasts a couple of seconds. The force of the sperm release propels the drone backward and his penis snaps off. That is the end of the drone. No happy returns for him. Considering the short time the mating takes it is amazing that somebody managed to photograph it. My drawing is from a picture I found on the Internet. The queen stores the sperm of this and all the other drones she mates in her spermatheca to be doled out at will. A young virgin queen has a limited time to mate. If she can’t fly because of bad weather she won’t get mated and will lay only unfertilized eggs. She’ll become a drone layer. That is why I’m so worried about the continuing bad weather we’re having. But maybe that delays the virgin queens being born too.

Rain and Damp

Rain and damp have plaqued these shores for the last 5 weeks. I'm worried about the bees. Are they warm enough? Can they find a honey source? Are the hives thriving? I was very glad to hear that Thimothy the beekeeper was due for another visit. He came late in the day. It was dry but overcast. The bees were still active but not like earlier in the day when they were going in and out of the hives in large numbers. Now the midges were out and for the first time this year they were stinging: much too early for my taste. Apparently when Timothy was here the last time and I was in the Burren, he had discovered that mites pestered the hives. He had put tablets of poison in the hives that he was now taking away again. But there was also good news. The hawthorn had come out in bloom like I had never seen before. Timothy took a photo of one of his bees feasting on the hawthorn blossom.

Corraun Mountain a mating site?

Once on a summer day I climbed Corraun Mountian. I started out from the northeast where the lonely little lakes hug the steep incline to the top. It’s a quietly beautiful but slightly creepy place that the sun only reaches very early on a cloudless day in high summer. When I climbed the top of the mountain was out of sight all the time so I didn’t really know where I would end up. Finally I came to a shoulder north from the top. It was so steep I crawled on all fours. On the last bit a lovely sweet smell reached my nose. It must have been the heather that was in bloom. Around me circled an enormous amount of bees. Where did they come from? There were only two beekeepers on the peninsula and one was my neighbour in Polranny and the other an old man in Owenduff Tonragee; both miles away. When I told the story to Timothy the beekeeper he was very interested. It might have been one of the elusive drone congregation areas, he reckoned. The drawing of Corraun Mountain was made from the north or Belfarset side.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

I was away staying with friends in the Burren. When I came back after a mere five days, not only did the County Council in name of the Irish Water Board install a water meter next to the gate to the Polranny Pirates hideaway, but Timothy the beekeeper had also put an extra storey on one of the starter hives. You can never lift your heels for a second without the world you left behind changing completely. I missed out on all the fun! Now I have to wait for the first water bill in a long time to be put into the mailbox and Timothy to come back to do the second hive.

Drones

The world of bees in which I submerge myself is getting more interesting but also more unsettling each time I look into a new phenomenon. This time it is drones, the male bee. They are born out of unfertilized eggs and do not work. Their sole purpose is to mate the queen. The fate of drones is that they either die after mating or are forced to leave the hive in the winter. To prevent inbreeding drones don’t mate the resident queen but go to a collective destination with all other drones from up to 200 different hives. There the drones wait for the virgin queens to arrive. A bit like the old Irish ‘dancing in the crossroads’ where the young men of the different villages gathered, some of them with a penny whistle or a violin or a uilleann pipe and wait for the girls to turn up to dancing and courting with. The drones visit more than one mating site and if they do not strike lucky they have to go all the way back to the hive for refueling. As there are many more drones than queens and even thou the queen mates more than once, there are still plenty of drones that don’t get laid. The same congregation areas are used year after year and as new inexperienced drones arrive every year the place must be clearly signposted in bee-speak but unseen and unheard of by humans.