The bees have it.

That would be honey bees and native bees.

The UC Davis Department of Entomology has just launched its new bee biology Web site.

It's a place to learn about research, outreach, publications and upcoming courses; read the news stories, and follow the progress of the Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, the half-acre bee friendly garden to be planted next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.

The people who make it happen--the honey bee team and the native bee team--share a passion well-known in the bee world.

The Web site also includes a kids' zone, links, photo gallery, and FAQs (how to remove stings and swarms, for example).

It wouldn't be a Web site without showcasing the work of Harry Hyde Laidlaw Jr., the Houston-born bee geneticist (1907-2003) whose name is legendary with bee genetics. Known as "the father of honey bee genetics," he served on the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty from 1947 to 1974, when he "offically" retired.

Officially he did, but unofficially he didn't.

The emeritus professor continued his research and outreach programs, publishing his last scientific paper at age 87 and his last book at 90. He died at age 96 at his home in Davis.

Beekeepers consider stings just a part of their job.

However, say the word "bee" and John Q. and Jane Q. Public may not think about the pollination of fruits, vegetables and nuts. Or the end product: honey.

The bee conjures up the "S" word: sting.

Of the scores of questions that Extension Apiculturist Eric Mussen has fielded since 1976 (when he joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty), many relate to bee stings.

Here are his answers to some of the most commonly asked questions:

1. Can a honey bee sting kill you?

If a person is highly sensitized to honey bee venom, one sting could be fatal, causing anaphylactic shock.  Otherwise, it is just painful and likely to cause some swelling and local tenderness that will last for two or three days.

2. How do you treat a honey bee sting?

Try to remove honey bee stings as quickly as possible, since venom is pumped from a sting into the victim for 45-60 seconds.  Stings are easily scraped off with a fingernail.  If many honey bees are stinging, leave the area quickly and deal with the stings when you are out of range of the defensive area (about 100 feet with European honey bees, but up to ¼ mile – 1,320 feet – with Africanized honey bees).  The pain can be reduced a bit by putting ice on the sting site, but the stabbing pain backs off fairly quickly without any treatment.

3. Can a honey bee hear you?

Honey bees do not have sensory organs that can pick up sounds that we can hear.  They are very sensitive to vibrations.  They feel us walking toward the nesting site before we get there.

4. Why do beekeepers use smokers when they visit their beehives?

The smoke from the smoker has three effects on the bees.  First, it prevents the guard bees from liberating much “alarm pheromone” (smells like bananas) in the hive.  Second, it prevents “soldier” bees in the hive from smelling the pheromone that has been secreted.  Third, it causes many bees to fill up on honey.  Despite the wives’ tales to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that the bees “think” there is a fire or that bees full of honey cannot sting.

5. Can honey bees see color?

Yes, honey bees can see nearly all the colors we see.  They cannot see red, which looks black to them.  They can see into the UV wavelengths a ways, which is beyond our limit at purple.  UV looks black to us.

6. Do honey bees need to eat meat?

No.  Unlike wasps, honey bees derive nearly all the important ingredients in their diet from pollens.  Pollens contain protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, sterols, and many plant-derived antioxidants.  No single pollen contains all the essential ingredients, so colonies do best where a good mix of attractive flowers are available.  Nectar, the dilute sugar syrup honey bees collect from flowers, contains mostly sugar, an energy food.  The flavor and color of honey depend upon the source of the nectar from which it is condensed.

There you have it: The A, Bee and C of the most commonly asked questions.

Bottom line: Sure, bees can and do sting, but our survival depends on them. Bees pollinate one-third of the food we eat (fruits, vegetables and nuts). They pollinate some 100 crops in California, including about 700,000 acres of almonds.

“The value of California crops pollinated by bees is $6.1 billion,” Mussen says.

Amazing.

An article posted on the ScienceNews Web site today indicates that North America did, too, have a honey bee.

For nearly 400 years, we've been told that the honey bee (genus Apis) did not exist on this continent until 1622. That's when the colonists brought it over from Europe.The Native Americans dubbed it "the white man's fly."

But wait!

Honey bees existed at least 14 million years ago in North America, according to a fossil record recently identified by paleontologist-entomologist Michael Engle of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The fossilized female worker bee, now at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, was unearthed in paper shale from Stewart Valley, west-central Nevada. The geological epoch: Middle Miocene.

Engle, the lead author of research published in the May 7th edition of the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, says the bee is definitely a honey bee. It has the distinctive hairy eyes, wing patterns and barbs on the stinger.

Unfortunately, this ancient bee--which Engle and his colleagues have named Apis nearctica--no longer exists. The researchers say it's most similar to the extinct species, Apis armbrusteri Zeuner from the Miocene epoch of southwestern Germany. 

Extension Apiculturist Eric Mussen, a member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty since 1976 and a noted authority on honey bees, tells us that "hairy eyes" is a distinctive feature of the honey bee. "All honey bees," he said, "have hairy eyes."

The Nevada bee certainly isn't the oldest known record of a fossilized bee. The oldest known bee is 100 million years old, found embedded in amber in Burma back in 2006.

But Apis nearctica is proof that North America was a native range of the honey bee. In the journal article, Engle says that "honey bees were likely truly absent" from North America duirng the Pliocense and Pleistocene, "not becoming reintroduced until the major European colonization of the New World in the early 17th century."

Fact is, the honey bee lived here, but it did not survive.

Which begs the question--OK, we have to ask--Was it some kind of a colony collapse disorder (CCD)?

It’s the lemon law.

When life hands you a lemon (cucumber), make honey.

The lemon cucumber (Cucumis sativus) is an increasingly popular garden vegetable that doesn't look like your typical cucumber. The vegetable is round to oval in shape and is pale yellow to pale green in color.

A key point about all cucumbers: No bees, no cucumbers. Or, no pollination, no cucumbers.

The photos below show a honey bee nectaring a lemon cucumber blossom and then packing the pollen.

You can see the pollen basket (corbicula), a concave structure located on the tibia of the hind legs. The pollen basket is fringed with hairs.

Bee use their middle legs to “pat down and compact the growing pollen mass in the pollen baskets,” according to A. I. Root (1839-1923) and E. R. Root (1862-1953) in their landmark encyclopedia. The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture. Although first published in 1877 and updated in 1920, the book maintains both an historical and current-day presence. It is considered a "must-have" or "must-read" book. The Smithsonian sponsored the digititzing and it can now be read online.

Here's what they have to say about cucumber blossoms:

“In the absence of bees, cucumber blossoms, whether in the field or hothouse, remain barren. The stamens and pistils are in different flowers on the same vine, the staminate flowers being more abundant on the main stems and the pistillate on the lateral branches.”