Much to ponder about life with bees

They have the same nutritional requirements as humans – carbohydrate for energy, fat for energy and vitamins, minerals and water.

Honey, sourced from nectar, is their carbohydrate. But why do honey bees make so much more than they need?

Fewer than 3 per cent of the 120,000 or so species of bees in the world make honey, very few store it and only the honey bee stores sufficient to be harvested in commercial quantities.

The native Australian Stingless Bee stores tasty honey in small quantity, enjoyed by indigenous Australians for centuries.

The Asian bee, which arrived in Cairns some years ago, does not store honey in sufficient quantities.

Why should it make honey in excess of immediate needs when it evolved with no winter to demand storage?

The European bee evolved in severe winters, laying up stores for long periods with no outside food source. They produce such an excess beyond their own needs that the honey industry thrives.

How do they do all that they do with such a small nervous system?

And yet, the bee begins work immediately on emerging from its pupating cell.

She proceeds through life performing a sequence of tasks with no training.

Outside as a forager, the bee demonstrates amazing navigation skills.

After brief orientation flights with no flight instructor, landmarks are remembered, the position of the sun is noted and even the earth’s magnetic field is used as an aid to navigation.

A scout bee finding a rich source of food can tell her mates back in the hive the direction of the find from the hive, the distance and the richness of the food source. 

The reproductive system of this insect is also remarkable. There is one fertile female in a colony of many thousands, the queen. She is the mother of all the other bees, laying over a thousand eggs a day.

The drone, the male is even more remarkable. His genome is known biologically as haploid – he has only half the number of chromosomes as females.