Sitting in the front row
Hi everyone,
Yesterday at 6:00 PM, SANDY and I took drinks to the patio and chose chairs close to the pool. Before long I noticed a honeybee circle the water and settle on a curve in the hose to our pool cleaner. It landed on a leaf, paused for a brief period, and flew away. A few minutes later, she was back and repeated the procedure, choosing the same leaf as before.
I started timing her. She took slightly less than 20 seconds to fill up with water. A bee can hold an ounce or so of water in a pouch called the honey stomach. She can carry nectar in there, too, but today she was toting water back to the nest. It took her nearly five minutes to make the roundtrip for another load of water. A bee can buzz along at fifteen miles an hour or better ( 1/4 of an hour per minute) so this bee was traveling roughly 1.25 miles roundtrip in five minutes. I estimated it might take her 30 seconds to enter the nest, empty her load of water, and set out again. Using the math, I figure the nest must be half a mile or so from our pool. During the summer, a healthy nest might number 50,000 – 80,000 bees. Somewhere 2,000 feet or so from where Sandy and I sat and enjoyed a summer evening, a lot of honeybees were going about their work.
I know the bee was female because the queen makes very few males. Females do all the work during their brief lives of a few weeks. Males aren’t worth much. They don’t feed themselves. They don’t make honey or care for the young. They don’t clean up around the hive. They might defend the opening to the nest from intruders, or beat their wings to help regulate temperature within the hive, sort of like the husband who empties the waste baskets and thinks he cleaned the whole house. Mostly they hang around until a new queen spirals up into the air on her nuptial flight and they rush after her hoping to mate. They’re not very good at that either. Most miss their target and those who make the connection lose their equivalent of a penis, which pulls out of their bodies and leaves them to die within a few minutes, presumably suffering a very uncomfortable experience.
One never knows, when relaxing on a patio, what slice of life may play out on the stage a few feet away. It’s good to have front row seats. 8/12/24
David L. Harrison
