Thursday 28 August 2008

The Truth About Bees

The Honey Bee is a member of a genus that dates back at least 35 million years, in fact some experts believe they have been producing honey for over 150 million years. They navigate by the sun, not only in the day but in the night. This means the Bee truly comprehended the spherical nature of the Earth long before a human bee-ing worked it out. They are also incredibly sensitive to the Earth's magnetism. In fact, placing a strong magnet underneath a beehive will disturb the geometric nature of the construction and the bees will build an odd, comb-shaped structure.

Nobody fully understands how the bee buzzes, as experiments have been undertaken with wing-clipping and spiracle stuffing, and still the bee buzzes.

Honey bees are considered to be the highest form of insect, and they are the only bee that dies after it stings you. This is because the stinger has barbs that stay in your skin to keep pumping venom; when the bee flies away it tears its exoskeleton and in most circumstances will die. The queen honey bee is, however, born without barbs so she can use her smooth stinger to kill other female bees. When a queen is born she utters a squawk; any new-born siblings respond, and the queen proceeds to find them all in the hive and kill them.

Bees like fermented apples, ie cider. If they get too drunk, guard bees will sting them to death. Stinging isn't the only form of defense though. Bees can form a buzzing vibrating sphere around an enemy, raising the interior temperature so much that the enemy inside dies. This is used to overthrow a defective queen, as well as defending the hive.

For more information visit your local beehive and beehusbandry centre.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

THat's a hive of shit.

Bees are shit. ASk any1 who is the best, and theyll say bees r shit.

im not a bee.

Anonymous said...

Bees are a specialised form of wasp. So if bees are shit that makes them a really satisfying shit, and wasps some horrid sloppy burning poop.

Anonymous said...

Bees aren't a specialised form of wasp - do not believe everything you read on Wikipedia. Just because bees and ants evolved from wasps does not mean you can still classify them as wasps. You may as well say humans are a specialised form of priomordial soup because that is what we evolved from.

But bees are hymenoptera, along with wasps, ants and sawflies. Because of their haplodiploidy hymenopterans are usually more closely related to their sisters than their daughters. This means that evolution has favoured eusociality (true sociality) as it is more advantageous to assist the queen to produce more sisters for you than to reproduce yourself. This trait is in common with termites (Isopterans).

Anonymous said...

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz i'm a specialised wasp so bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz