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  • We, the Bee-people: Honey Bees in America
    August 14, 2017 Scott Derrick

    We, the Bee-people: Honey Bees in America

    Honey bees are United States immigrants. They are relatively recent newcomers (on the species movement timescale anyway), arriving at the time of colonization sometime in the 17th century. Some are presumed to have made the trans-Atlantic journey as hitchhikers and stowaways; others were brought here purposefully under the provision of their European guardians. ‘White man’s flies’, the Native Indians called them.
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  • What’s the Deal with Hexagonal Honeycombs?
    August 14, 2017 Scott Derrick

    What’s the Deal with Hexagonal Honeycombs?

    You see them in the secret chambers of the Pantheon; you see them form when you blow soap bubbles across a water surface; you see them coddling green goods in transport truck freight. Hexagons. This six-sided polygon appears in myriad nooks, crannies and infrastructures throughout nature, and there’s a reason why humans have been incorporating them into designs grand and humble over history. Where the hexagon features in its most marveled-at architecture, however, is the beehive.
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  • A Guide to Honey Bee Pollinator Friendly Plants
    August 14, 2017 Scott Derrick

    A Guide to Honey Bee Pollinator Friendly Plants

    Once upon a time, not so very long ago, native plants and grasses bedecked the American landscape in huge, rolling swathes. Pollinators of many a feather, stripe and fur would spend their days visiting each flower as it bloomed, partners in a whirling dance of ongoing life.

    Humans however – especially colonial humans – have a way of interrupting that dance. The woodlands and fields don’t blush with color as they once did, and pollinator species are having a harder time than ever finding enough food to support them through the seasons.

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  • How Bees Are Helping Us in the Fight Against Dementia
    August 14, 2017 Scott Derrick

    How Bees Are Helping Us in the Fight Against Dementia

    The average bee’s brain contains somewhere around 950,000 neurons. It is the size of a sesame seed. By comparison, a human brain has a ballpark 100 billion neurons, with the capacity for language, consciousness, philosophical thought, and at its high-performing best, creating works like “The entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster” (which at time of writing, sits at almost 16k views on YouTube). These differences aside, recent studies focusing on the fuzzy insects’ noggins are providing exciting clues which may help us better understand and ultimately combat deadly neurodegenerative diseases like dementia.
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  • What Happens When the Queen Bee Dies?
    August 14, 2017 Scott Derrick

    What Happens When the Queen Bee Dies?

    Long live the queen. And queen bees do live long – somewhere between 3 to 5 years (although some estimates stretch it to 9). Compared to the worker bee, which reaches the end of her life cycle somewhere around the 42-day mark, she might as well live for a bee-time eon. But whether it’s by disease, old age, natural disaster, or beekeeper murder (which, under certain circumstances, is recommended), at some point or other, the queen must die.

    What then? Do the worker bees riot? Does chaos erupt, and the hive plunge into anarchy? After all, the queen bee is the only bee in the hive fully capable of producing offspring (at the upwards rate of one egg per minute, no less). Though worker bees are physically capable of laying unfertilized eggs (which hatch into male drones by way of parthenogenesis), this rarely occurs. There are two main reasons. The first is to do with the queen’s particular perfume – the spread of which convinces the colony they are “queenright”. It is a powerful pheromone, with various physiological effects – one of which is to cause the eggs inside of all the other females to wither and die (an example of “programmed cell death”). It’s as though she’s putting all her lower-ranked sisters on the pill just by existing.

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