Stephen Buchmann, University of Arizona
As trees and flowers blossom in spring, bees emerge from their winter nests and burrows. For many species it’s time to mate, and some will start new solitary nests or colonies.
Bees and other pollinators are essential to human society. They provide about one-third of the food we eat, a service with a global value estimated at up to $US577 billion annually.
But bees are interesting in many other ways that are less widely known. In my new book, “What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees,” I draw on my experience studying bees for almost 50 years to explore how these creatures perceive the world and their amazing abilities to navigate, learn, communicate and remember. Here’s some of what I’ve learned.
Because people are widely familiar with honeybees, many assume that all bees are social and live in hives or colonies with a queen. In fact, only about 10% of bees are social, and most types don’t make honey.
Most bees lead solitary lives, digging nests in the ground or finding abandoned beetle burrows in dead wood to call home. Some bees are cleptoparasites, sneaking into unoccupied nests to lay eggs, in the same way that cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and let the unknowing foster parents rear their chicks.
A few species of tropical bees, known as vulture bees, survive by eating carrion. Their guts contain acid-loving bacteria that enable the bees to digest rotting meat.
The world looks very different to a bee than it does to a human, but bees’ perceptions are hardly simple. Bees are intelligent animals that likely feel pain, remember patterns and odors and even recognize human faces. They can solve mazes and other problems and use simple tools.
Research shows that bees are self-aware and may even have a primitive form of consciousness. During the six to 10 hours bees spend sleeping daily, memories are consolidated within their amazing brains – organs the size of a poppy seed that contain 1 million nerve cells. There are some indications that bees might even dream. I’d like to think so.
Bees’ sensory experience of the world is markedly different from ours. For example, humans see the world through the primary colors of red, green and blue. Primary colors for bees are green, blue and ultraviolet.
Bees’ vision is 60 times less sharp than that of humans: A flying bee can’t see the details of a flower until it is about 10 inches away. However, bees can see hidden ultraviolet floral patterns that are invisible to us, and those patterns lead the bees to flowers’ nectar.
The bee hangs by one leg and scrapes the pollen into “baskets” – structures on her hind legs. Then she repeats the buzzing on the remaining anthers before moving to different flowers.
Bees also use buzz pollination on the flowers of blueberries, cranberries, eggplant and kiwi fruits. My colleagues and I are conducting experiments to determine the biomechanics of how bee vibrations eject pollen from anthers.
Many species of bees are declining worldwide, thanks to stresses including parasites, pesticides and habitat loss.
Whether you have an apartment window box or several acres of land, you can do a few simple things to help bees.
First, plant native wildflowers so that blooms are available in every season. Second, try to avoid using insecticides or herbicides. Third, provide open ground where burrowing bees can nest. With luck, soon you’ll have some buzzing new neighbors.
Stephen Buchmann, Adjunct Professor of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This website uses cookies.
