Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article ”The Hum of Bees" by Susan Brind Morrow, which appeared in Harper's Magazine (©1998 by the Harpers Magazine Foundation). Note that all worker honeybees are female.

A beehive in summer contains 30,000 bees or more. In the spring and summer a queen lays up to 1, 500 eggs a day. The infant bees emerge, just as many older worker bees die, having shredded their wings to pieces in foraging flights. The life span of a worker is four to six weeks. The queen will live up to four or five years.

These are the intricate of a honeybee's career. First, maggotlike larvae from the eggs laid in the hexagonal cells of the hive by the queen. Young workers of five days of age or more who have been feeding heavily on pollen produce for the larvae a protein-rich substance called bee milk or royal jelly. The larvae grow to five hundred times their original weight. In six days, when their bodies have swollen to fill their cells completely, they spin silk cocoons about themselves. Older workers cap the cells with a fine, light wax. The new bee miraculously evolves, translucent and perfect, and on the twelfth day after the capping chews her way out through the lid of her cell.

For the first three days of life the young bee walks around the brood comb, licking clean the newly emptied cells and polishing them with her saliva. Only if a cell has been prepared this way will the queen lower her abdomen into it and lay an egg. After three days, the hypopharyngeal glands in the young bee's head have fully developed, and she becomes a nurse. She begins by feeding the older, bigger larvae, but as she becomes more skilled she feeds the younger, more delicate larvae with bee milk from her mouth. At the end of ten days the glands on the head of the nurse begin to shrink; she can no longer produce royal jelly.

The four pairs of wax glands on her lower abdomen have now reached their full size, and she begins to secrete wax. The wax forms in scales and slides out from the underside of her abdomen. In the warmer months, when the population of the hive swells, the wax-producing bees begin to build layers of new comb. They gorge themselves on honey and secrete Immense quantities of wax(consuming six to eight pounds of honey to produce one pound of wax). Workers roll the wax up away from their abdomens with their legs, and chew and soften it with saliva. With their mouths and feet they manipulate the wax to form the mathematically precise sheets of fragile hexagonal cells that honey bees have routinely created for millions of years.

In the second stage of life (between ten and twenty days old) worker bees go to the entrance of the hive and receive in their mouths the nectar that older foragers have brought back in their honey stomachs. A forager may visit hundreds of sources of nectar (for example, each of the florets on a head of clover) to fill her honey stomach—a kind of holding tank—just once. Every teaspoon of honey may require thousands of trips to the field by forager bees.

The receiving bee holds the nectar in her honey stomach as she carries it up to the cells where the honey is stored. When she disgorges the nectar she adds to it fluids secreted from her salivary and now contracted hypopharyngeal glands, filled with enzymes to purify and preserve the honey. The receiving bees pack the nectar into honey cells. Other workers stand above, thrumming their wings to evaporate excess moisture and thicken the nectar.

The bees now begin to make their first excursion outside, short flights to familiarize themselves with the territory. Some are responsible for clearing refuse from the hive; they carry the corpses of other bees a distance from the hive and drop them to the ground. Others guard the entrance to the hive; they use their stingers to attack intruders, including honey-stealing bees from other hives.

In the final period of a worker bee's life, from about the twentieth day until her death, she becomes a forager, collecting water, resin, nectar, or pollen. Her body is ingeniously shaped for the work. Her inner back legs are covered with bristly brushes that mesh together on opposite legs. The bee brushes away pollen from a flower's thickly coated stamens, then forces the pollen through the stiff hairs of one leg with the bristles of the leg opposite, as though combing or sifting it. On the outer side of her back legs are deep indentations called pollen baskets. She moistens the pollen with honey that she has brought from the hive in her honey stomach. She forms the pollen into a ball, like bread dough, packs it into her pollen baskets, then flies back to the hive with bright bulbs of pollen bulging from her legs.