Sunday 18 September 2011

Weekly Reading Respone: Week 1

I find it really interesting and truly ingenious how dependent the bees are on smells and pheromones, though it must have taken centuries for them to develop and evolve to that stage when they had the necessary glandes to produce them, and the receptors to pick them up. Of that comes with their sensitivity and agitation to other foreign smells.
It's also fairly convenient for the bee hive owners that bees create their brood chambers in the base levels of the hive, while they make their honey combs in the top ones, so that it easily accessed, and one doesn't need to worry about the brood chambers mixing in with the honey combs.
The top bar hives seem very cool as well, but not quite as efficient as the bees seem to have to make their combs from scratch, while the langstroth hives have the base hexagons already in place for the bees to build on, giving them more time to work on building up the hive and to forage.
Ok, this last video dwarfs all the others. This is nuts how they can communicate distance and bearing through a dance and number of abdominal waggles, though I don't quite understand why the other bees need to sting the bee to death that's telling them where to go if it doesn't stop...  Furthermore, the bees "hexagonal lenses" in it's eyes are pretty crazy too, and how they can track the sun with them, and measure how far they've traveled by how much honey they've eaten.