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| Sunday, 2 January 2005 |
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Junior Observer |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Fascinating world of social insects - Bees We know that people who live and work together form a society. In the same way, animals that live and work together belong to a society. In the insect world too there are many that live in societies such as ants, honeybees, hornets, termites and some varieties of wasps.
Honeybees are so inter-dependent that without all of them , the colony would not thrive. Honeybees live in a hive made of cells with wax walls. More than forty thousand bees can live in a single honeybee hive. These bees all have different responsibilities which they do diligently to stay alive!
Now guess who does all the work in a bee hive? The worker bees and they are all females. But these worker bees do not lay eggs like the queen bee. Instead, they carry out various other chores. Their main tasks are feeding the queen and taking care of the babies!
Both worker bees and drone bees live only for about six months. Drones do not sting.
Where do you think the bees store the honey they make? In the empty cells in the hive. And when winter arrives they survive on the honey they have stored. If not for the efforts of the worker bees to bring in honey, the entire colony of bees will perish without food.
If the drones do not die, they are ejected from the nest by the workers so that they starve to death. The queen lays upto 2,000 eggs every day of her three-to-five-year life inside ordinary hexagonal honeycomb cells. She also lays a few eggs inside special cone-shaped cells, built separately from the hexagonal ones.
Instead of this rich nutrient, the larvae in these cells are fed on pollen and nectar until they mature into non-producing females or drones. But the larvae in the cone-shaped cells are given royal jelly until they mature because they are 'royalty'. The larvae, which are all females, mature into queens but only one can stay in a hive. So, one of them will replace the old queen who will either be killed or fly away to form a new nest elsewhere, taking with her a swarm of worker bees. The same fate awaits the royal siblings. Usually the first mature queen that appears, kills the rest of them, but if any survive, they leave the nest and form their own bee colony.
The odour of the nectar tells the rest what kind of flowers to look for. Then, the bee is said to do one of two kinds of dances. a circle dance and the figure of eight dance. The circle dance tells the bees that the nectar is less than 100 metres from the hive. The figure of eight dance tells the bees two things: one, that the nectar is more than 100 metres away and two, the direction in which they should fly to find the nectar. The middle line of the figure eight points to where the nectar can be found. The bees usually watch the dance but scientists have discovered that bees can find the nectar even without watching it.They do so by listening to, quiet sounds that the bee makes while dancing. **** Termites are also fascinating creatures... Termites are pale, soft bodied, ant-like social insects which comprise the order Isoptera. Termite colonies consist of workers, soldiers, reproductives, a king and a queen. There are around 1,700 species of termites. They are found mainly in the tropics and continents of North America, Australia, Africa and South America. A female termite can live upto 15-25 years and may lay over 30,000 eggs a day, making a lifetime total of over 250 million eggs! The king is larger than the other males and is a permanent member of the colony. The termite queen is easily recognised due to her oversized body which could measure upto 14 cm (5 1/2 inches) in some species. Unable to move, she usually spends her whole life in one place, eating and laying eggs. Termite soldiers can be males or females but they are all wingless. Only the young kings and queens have wings. This enables them to fly off and form their own colonies. The wings then break off. **** Fact file * As many as three million termites can live in a single nest. * Some kinds of termites build nests upto six metres high. * Termite soldiers have huge heads and very strong jaws to defend the nest against attacks. But they cannot take care of themselves. They must be fed by workers or they will starve. * Army ants do not build nests that look like other insect nests. Their nests hang from tree branches or inside hollow logs. * Hornets make paper by chewing up wood and other plant matter and use it to build their nests. * In ant colonies, there are soldiers - a fourth caste. They are non-productive females and are bigger than worker ants which are usually wingless. |
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| Politics | Produced by Lake House |
Most social insects live in nests or hives and the members have
different jobs to do. Many of these insects know other members of the
group by their odour. Let's check out the 'social behaviour' of some of
these insects, because we humans could learn so much from these creatures,
who are united, organised, methodical and responsible!
The focal point in a honeybee hive is the queen bee, a female larger
than the rest of the bees in the hive. She is well cared for and looked
after by all the bees in her kingdom. The queen bee has only one task to
perform; that is to lay thousands of eggs to ensure that their species
continue for generations. A hive usually has only one queen which may live
for about five years.
They bring honey and food to feed the queen and others, they help build
and repair the cells of the hive, and also defend the hive from enemies!
One would think that the latter responsibility at least would have fallen
on the 'wings' of the male bees known as drone bees but no... The drones
which are the same size as the females only mate with the queen and ensure
regeneration.
What's interesting is that among the worker bees too, there are bees
assigned to carry out different tasks. Some go out of the hive to collect
nectar - a sweet liquid from flowers they use to make honey, and others
stay at home and work in the nursery, feeding, cleaning and nurturing the
little bees.
The worker bees are hatched from fertilized eggs while the males are
hatched from unfertilized eggs laid by the queen. They have only half of
the normal number of chromosomes of the workers and queen.
The worker bees feed all larvae that hatch from these eggs for the
first few days with a protein like substance obtained from their salivary
glands. It is called royal jelly. However, this royal jelly is fed only
for a short time to the larvae in the hexagonal cells.
But how do honeybees know to find nectar? For many years this mystery
puzzled scientists who studied bees, and in the early 1900s, an Austrian
scientist named Karl von Frisch, solved it. He discovered that a group of
bees manage to head straight for a flower with nectar because of a message
left by a bee who first hunts for it. First the bee leaves a drop of
nectar in the hive.
