- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Peter Pan vowed he'd never grow up.
"I won't grow up!" yelled the boy, a figment of a Scottish novelist's imagination. "I won't grow up!"
So it is with Peter Pan Agapanthus (Agapanthus africanus), a dwarf version of a spectacular flower known as Lily of the Nile.
It won't grow up.
And that's a good thing.
Sometimes good things come in small blue packages. Honey bees go absolutely berserk over this little African lily.
It's fascinating to watch honey bees gleefully slide down the funnel-shaped blossom as if they possess an E ticket. The funnel is a floral playground and the bees are Peter Pan bees.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Quick! How many legs does a honey bee have?
If you said "three pairs" or "six legs," you'd bee right.
But have you ever noticed the honey bee in flight?
The worker bee packs pollen in her pollen baskets or corbiculae, located on the midsegments of her outer hind legs.
The legs are fringed with long, curved hairs that hold the pollen in place. Once she's gathered pollen, she moves it to the pollen press located between the two largest segments of the hind leg.
The pollen press basically presses the pollen into pellets.
Sometimes the pollen load looks as big as a beach ball and you wonder how she can carry that load back to the hive.
But she does.
The bee with the huge pollen load below is one of Susan Cobey's bees. She's a UC Davis bee breeder-geneticist and manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Claire Preston isn't a beekeeper but she's written an informative book titled Bee.
Published in 2006 by Reaktion Books,
Especially sweet.
Her 10 chapters tantalize us with such headings as "The Reason for Bees," "Biological Bee," "Kept Bee," "Political Bee," "Pious/Corrupt Bee," "Utile Bee," Aesthetic Bee," "Folkloric Bee," "Playful Bee," "Bee Movie" and the last, "Retired Bee."
But back to Bee.
Preston traces the history of bees (Apis mellifera) to southern Asia: bees probably originated in Afghanistan, she says. They were imported to South America in the 1530s and to what is now the United States (Virginia) in 1621. Native Americans called them "The Englishman's fly."
Preston calls the bee "Nature's workaholic" and borrowing a comment from Sue Monk Kidd's superb novel, The Secret Life of Bees, remarks: "You could not stop a bee from working if you tried."
"The most talented specialists (in the bee colony) are the workers," Preston writes. "They are the builders, brood-nurses, honey-makers, pollen-stampers, guards, porters, and foragers, and those tasks are related to their developmental age."
"All worker bees, in other words, take up these functions in succession as they mature, with the newest workers undertaking nursing, cleaning, building and repair in the nest, somewhat older workers making honey and standing guard, and the oldest bees foraging for pollen and nectar."
Frankly, bees are social insects in a highly social organization. They don't waver from their duties. The queen's job is to mate and then lay eggs for the rest of her life. The drone's job is to mate and then die. If the drones make it to autumn, the worker bees drive them from the hives "to die of starvation," Preston writes. "This exclusion of some hundreds of drones each autumn is one of the most remarkable sights in the animal kingdom. The workers are pitiless: drones do no work in the maintenance of the colony and cannot even feed themselves, so they cannot be allowed to overwinter and consume precious resources."
It's a sad time, to be sure. Bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey, manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis, tells us she feels sorry for the drones. "They're cold and hungry and get pushed out of the hive."
And, as UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen says: "First the workers quit feeding them (drones) so they're light enough to push out."
But as winter ebbs away and spring beckons, soon each hive will be teeming with some 50,000 to 60,000 bees. And all those worker bees--which Preston calls "agricultural workers"--will be turning into Nature's workaholics.
They'll never be promoted to CEO, though.
Not a chance.
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- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
There they sat, a row of jack o'lanterns ready for a light.
Undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis, created them for the "Happy Halloween" open house, held Oct. 23 at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, 1124 Academic Surge, UC Davis.
All that the oranges globes needed: someone with a match.
Outreach education program coordinator Brian Turner obliged, lighting the three jack o'lanterns: a butterfly, a dragonfly and a bee. (Me thinks the honey-bee jack o'lantern was really a jill o'lantern.)
Honey bees--the queen bee, workers and drones--drew eager interest at the open house. Visitors admired a honey bee observation hive, learned about bees, and tasted honey. Even royal jelly. So, what does royal jelly taste like, this food of queen bees? It tastes like you want another taste of clover honey. Quick.
Visitors also checked out the Madagascar hissing cockroaches, giant New Guinea walking sticks and assorted spiders as they sampled chicken wings, shrimp, fruit and cookies.
The museum, named for prominent entomologist Richard Bohart (1913-2007), was founded in 1946. Directed by Lynn Kimsey (who also serves as chair of the Department of Entomology), the museum is known for having the seventh largest insect collection in North America. It houses some seven million insect specimens.
And now, three jack o'lanterns.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
I've always loved the wit and wisdom of insect-inspired poets.
God in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
- - Ogden Nash "The Fly"
We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.
- - Richard Vaughan
If you look at the world through a viewfinder--as I have a habit of doing--it's a wonderful, exquisite place, especially if you capture critters in their natural habitat. They don't complain when you make them look fat, skinny, nice or ferocious.
Blow flies, honey bees, carpenter bees, spotted cucumber bees, the ten-lined June beetle, and mosquitoes all appear in my viewfinder. Okay, I know. We're not supposed to like some of these pests (such as the carpenter bees, spotted cucumber bees and the ten-lined June beetles), but hey, all of them are pretty enough to sing the national anthem at the Olympics.
Photography, or writing with light, is just that. Writing with light. Back before the digital technology age, we used to process film, make prints and then hang them out to dry. We "pho-togs" marinated ourselves in Dektol, DK-60 and Hypo.
Our "pheromone" wasn't always appreciated. But the images were.
Bees are black, with gilt surcingles,
Buccaneers of buzz.
- - Emily Dickinson
The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
- - Andy Warhol