A Gathering of Gardeners

Garden Club co-founder and Bee Club president, Norm Jarvis was the featured speaker at the most recent Garden Club meeting, and provided a fascinating presentation about the life of bees, and their relationship with our gardens.

“People might be wondering why this is a suitable topic for Garden Club,” Norm said as he began his presentation. “It’s a question of mutualism: bees need flowers, and flowers need bees.”

Norm, who tends beehives at his home, said that if it wasn’t for bees, the amount and varieties of fruits and vegetables we enjoy would be dramatically (and negatively) affected. “Every year, millions of honey bees get trucked into Oregon fields; specifically to pollinate crops and fruits. Bees represent a large-scale agricultural pollination program.”

And then things got really interesting.

DID YOU KNOW?

Modern beehives are built to mimic a hollow tree, which is where honey bees built their hives throughout history. Hollow trees have air flow at the top and bottom, as do the beehives you see in the fields throughout the county, each of which houses 20,000 to 80,000 bees.

Up to 80,000 in a single hive, yes…but there are only three types of honey bees:

1. The Queen: she only has one job: lay 1,000 to 2,000 eggs a day, thus repopulating the hive.

2. Drones: they also have a single job: to mate with the queen. (Not a dream job, because they’re all kicked out of the hive at the end of every summer, and die.)

3. A huge amount of worker bees (all female).

These worker bees are where the magic is to be found. They do the vast majority of work in the hive, and they perform different tasks: they don’t just spend their days flitting from flower to flower.

There are cleaner worker bees, which keep the hive in proper order. Comb-builder ones that build the cells which will house the next generation of workers. And there are nurse-tender bees to take care of the newborns.

During the hottest days of summer, worker bees can become HVAC Specialists. They move their wings in unison by their thousands to create air flow within the hive, thus cooling it. (Bees like their hive to be about 90-97 degrees Fahrenheit (at least in the brood area), and if it’s cold in winter, they can generate enough heat with their wing muscles to maintain nearly that temperature in a tight bee cluster (similar to penguins). 

Worker bees become chefs (of a sort) and make honey by mixing nectar with saliva from their mouths. (Is honey basically made up of flower pollen and bee spit?)

There are also bees who do guard duty. They keep the hive safe by inspecting every visitor to the hive. The guards touch antennae with everyone that tries to enter, and there’s big trouble if the visitor isn’t recognized as a fellow-hive dweller.

And when needed, worker bees turn into mortuary bees, and discard the hive’s dead (worker bees only live between four to six weeks. The queen lives about five years.)

Drones, as we’ve learned, get thrown out of the hive at the end of summer. But until that dreadful day happens, there are drone feeder bees to take care of these louche layabouts. And the Queen is surrounded by Attendants, which groom her.

There are also pollen packers that pack the honeycomb’s cells with pollen. And finally…drum roll, please…there are bees that collect nectar, which will be used to make the honey that honey bees are so famous for. (They can fly up to three miles to find flowers.)

THERE’S MORE!

Honey bees represent only one species of bees. Oregon has 600 to 700 native bee types. Most do not build colonies like honey bees do.

Bees aren’t the only species that pollinate flowers: moths, butterflies, even bats do it.

Some bees are specialists, and are the only ones that can make their way into specific flowers. And many  flowers use pigments that reflect ultra-violet light (which we can’t see, but bees can) to show landing strips on their petals, which act as “nectar guides” to attract  the bees and indicate where they should land and be able to go directly to the nectar.

If a bee discovers a specifically good patch of flowers, it will return to the hive and perform a waggle dance for the other bees. In this way, it communicates how large the flower patch is, how far away it is from the hive, and the direction other bees should take to find it.

And if you were wondering if bees sleep? They do, but in 10 minute segments. They’re also quite active through the night.