On bees

So, my recent post on short-haired bumblebees got me a-wonderin' about bees. There's honey bees, bumblebees, carder bees, cuckoo bees, carpenter bees, sweat bees, stingless bees... and they're just the ones that spring immediately to my mind. But what's the difference between the bees and why don't we eat bumblebee honey?


WHAT THE F*** IS HONEY ABOUT

Honeycomb, George Shuklin

Honey is a food source used by some social bees to feed their young. It's essentially nectar from flowers that foraging worker bees have sucked up into a special nectar stomach. When a foraging honeybee returns to the hive it regurgitates the nectar into the mouth of a hive bee. The hive bee then adds various enzymes and such that break down the complex sugars into more simple fructose and glucose. Once this is done, the honey is deposited into a wax honeycomb, the hive bees fan the comb to help water evaporate increasing the sugar concentration -- once the honey is a supersaturated solution that by rights shouldn't be liquid, the bees seal of the honey, which is then ready to use as a food source for the hive in winter. The primary food source of most bees is pollen, some bees other than honeybees do make honey, but only in small amounts and never to quite the same magical effect: bumblebee honey is often said to be quite watery, and no more than a 100 g (usually a lot less) will be in the colony at any one time.



HONEY IS THE ONLY FOOD THAT DOESN'T GO OFF
If anyone ever asks you in a pub quiz what the only food is that never goes off, answer "honey" -- it's the answer they want. However, this isn't really true. So, OK, honey is pretty sterile and almost no bacteria will grow in it. When it changes from liquid to solid in your cupboard, that's just a process of crystalisation and it's still perfectly edible. So yeah, maybe honey won't go off as long as it doesn't get wet. But what about salt, and sugar, and canned goods? They don't go off? I've got a bag of flour in my cupboard with a best before date of 2005, it's fine! How many times have you read a news story about a can of Spam found in an old bomb shelter that still tasted just as good as the day it was canned during the Blitz? I mean, I don't know what the strict definition of "foodstuff" is, but I'm about as likely to eat a bowl of sugar as I am a bowl of honey -- and I'm as likely to add salt to my porridge as I am honey (I'm no Goldilocks).


BEES' DISTANT COUSINS
Bees are part of the large group of insects, the hymenoptera, the etymology of which I once discussed here, which also include sawflies, wasps, and ants. With over 130 000 species, hymenoptera are one of the largest groups of insects; we know quite a lot about some hymenoptera because the trait of sociality, which is by no means universal to the group, but expressed by many of the best known members (some bees and wasps and all ants). Sociality in this sense is not just hanging out together, lots of animals do that, but rather hanging out in groups in which different individuals have different roles within the group (for example, but not limited to, workers, reproductive individuals, guards, and so on). This form of sociality, called eusociality by biologists, is very rare in the animal kingdom, naked mole rats provide another example.


BEEING
There are nine families (groups based on shared physical and genetic characteristics) of bees comprising 20 000 known species found on all continents except Antarctica. But we are perhaps most interested in bees because of just one species, the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Among the 20 000 bee species, honey bees and bumblebees are quite closely related, relatively.


BUMBLEBEES
Bumblebees, any of 250 species in the genus Bombus, belong to the same family as honeybees. They are essentially large, hairy, social bees. Unlike honeybees, bumblebees live in small colonies of at most a hundred or so individuals that typically die off after just one breeding season. A queen will start a colony in spring, or earlier, produce workers throughout the summer. Towards the end of the summer, the colony will start to produce breeding bees -- queens and drones. These bees fly off, look for mates from other colonies, and the mated queens then hibernate, emerging in spring to start a new colony.



WHEN IS A BEE A CUCKOO?

Cuckoo bee

NEVER! However, there are quite a few species of bees that have given up collecting pollen and nectar to feed their own young, and instead lay their eggs in the colonies of other bees, just like the European cuckoo does with other birds. Most cuckoo bees belong to the group Nomadinae, and these generally look a bit waspish, parasitise solitary bee species, and nip in to a nest, lay their egg, and leave. In the genus Bombus, cuckoo bees in the subgenus Psithyrus resemble closely the social bumblebees they parasitise; the cuckoo queens invade the bumblebee colony, kill the queen and take up residence, getting the workers of that colony to raise her own brood.



ETYMOLOGBEE
Just 153 years ago in the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote of humblebees rather than bumblebees, and for centuries before, although both terms were in use, humblebee was more prevalent. For no apparent reason, however, since the end of World War II the term humblebee has fallen into almost complete disuse. The "humble" had nothing to do with pie or low rank, but instead was related to the hum the bees make as they fly. The Latin name for the genus of bumblebees is Bombus, so one might think that the newly adopted preference for the "b" spelling arose that way somehow given the similarity between "humblebee" and "bumblebee". This is actually all much of a muchness: the Latin "bombus" has its origins in the Greek "bombos" meaning "hum".


STINGLESS, CARPENTER, MASON, SWEAT
No, I'm not counting cherry stones. There's basically crap loads of bees -- like honeybees, bumblebees, cuckoo bees, many of their names describe their habits. Sweat bees are attracted to human sweat, as such you'd think I'd be more familiar with them than I am. Most stingless bees are social relatives of honeybees that, you guessed it, can't sting because their stingers are greatly reduced; although several other groups of bees have lost their stings, and are also stingless bees but not known as such. Carpenter bees nest in holes in wood, bamboo, or structural timber. Mason bees make compartments of mud or clay in their nests. Orchid bees are bees from central and south America that gather fragrances from orchids. There are so many bees that some of them don't even have common names: the 25 species in the smallest family of bees, the Stenotritidae, are known only by their latin binomials.

Orchid bee

TWO BEES OR NOT TWO BEES
Although we often think of bees as social animals, the vast majority of species aren't. The same is true of wasps and sawflies their hymenopteran cousins. Rather than being common to all hymenoptera, sociality has evolved numerous occasions within the group. The reason bees, ants, and wasps are prone to sociality is probably to do with the haplodiploid method of sex determination, which means that males arise from unfertilised (haploid; one set of chromosomes) eggs, but females arise from fertilised (diploid; two sets) eggs -- this means that sisters are often more closely related to each other than to their mothers or fathers, which means that cooperation between sisters will lead to evolutionary success.



BEE GEEKERY
Actually, sometimes diploid bees will be males, but that's because they share identical copies of the genes that determine sex on both the relevant chromosomes (normally the copies of these genes on two different chromosomes in a pair would differ).  The likelihood of a queen producing a diploid drone increases if the male she mates with is a close relative. Diploid drones are less fertile than haploid drones, so actually detrimental to a colony -- workers typically sniff out diploid drones and kill the larvae before they develop too far, thus saving the hive the energy of raising them.


EPBEELOGUE
This, er, brief foray into the world of bees reflects some things I thought interesting about bees, some things I'd wondered about, and then some interesting things I found out while researching the things I had pondered. There's about a million and one things known about bees that I have not even scraped the surface of, and even more that people don't know about bees. But don't you worry, I am sure to return to the topic in future AOTWs. One might say "I'll bee back".

Animal of the week May 28, 2012 -- the shite of the bumblebee

Hey!

Three AOTWs in 1 month? You've got to be kidding, right? Because reintroductions of species lost from the UK is a favourite topic of mine, this week's animal is Bombus subterraneus (short-haired bumblebee).

Of the 25 species of bumblebee native to the UK, three have vanished and others are in rapid decline. The decline is thought to be largely due to loss of habitat and increased use of pesticides associated with intensification of agriculture since the end of the second world war. The last short-haired bumblebee was seen in the UK in 1988.

The short-haired bumblebee has, er, short hair, and is a long-tongued late emerging species. The Bumblebee Conservation Trust along with other conservation partners gathered 100 females from Sweden, after a couple of weeks in quarantine, checking their droppings to make sure they had no parasites or diseases, about 50 of these bees have been released at the RSPB reserve at Dungeness in Kent.

Finding 50 Swedish queens that are parasite and disease free is no mean feat, and it's hoped that these bees will now establish colonies at the reserve. The work of the conservationists planting wildflower meadows while preparing the site for the release has also been good news for other bee species: the shrill carder bee has returned after an absence of some years.

Welcome back short-haired bumblebee. May your colonies grow strong in the coming summer.

NB: this story is deficient in puns because the BBC got their first.

Animal of the Week May 7, 2012 -- y'alright cock

Female greater vasa parrot in mating plumage (forground)

Back in the mists of time, before the Baiji was declared extinct, before Tony Blair's Labour government was elected for a third term, before Boris Johnson became Mayor of London, before a million other sadnesses, animal of the week began because I wanted to find out what the "other" poisonous mammal was. As someone very interested in animals, particularly mammals and birds, I was stunned I had never heard before of a solenodon. Just recently I had a similar zoological epiphany when I discovered (on the internet -- not in an adventurous exploratory sense) Coracopsis vasa (the greater Vasa parrot).


I'm was extra surprised not to know about the vasa parrot, because it is from Madagascar and has weird sex (for a bird). And if there are two things sure to pique my interest, they are weird sexual behaviour and living on and island (cf  my favourite Amanda Donahoe film, Castaway).

Perhaps one of the reasons these birds are overlooked in the natural history programmes is their slightly odd mating behaviour. While many are aware that dogs and wolves can become locked together during coitus in a copulatory tie, you rarely hear David Attenborough discussing this. And dogs are cute: by the time the vasa parrot female is linked to her mate (usually for half an hour sometimes for much longer) she has lost all the feathers on her head, which has turned bright yellow -- the couple, I imagine, bear a striking resemblance to copulating skeksis from the film The Dark Crystal.

Skeksis from The Dark Crystal

What makes the copulatory tie particularly special in these birds is that the presence of a penis-like organ is unique among parrots. Indeed, very few birds have such an organ: other notable exceptions include ostriches and ducks, which like the vasa parrot mostly keep their organ inside and only protrude it when mating. Most other birds exchange gametes through a cloacal kiss.

The mating system among these birds is also unusual because they are polygynandrous, with a female mating with several males. If kept in captivity, breeding is more successful if a single female is kept with two or more males. During the breeding season the females become very vocal and occasionally violent with reports of them killing males housed with them.


Despite the slightly adult themes of this AOTW, I'd like to dedicate this week's animal, squawking away on a distant island in their own wild rumpus, to Maurice Sendak, author of Where The Wild Things Are.

Animal of the Week April 30, 2012 -- back from the brynx?

(c) Programa de Conservación Ex-situ del Lince Ibérico www.lynxexsitu.es

Hola!

Animal of the Quarter is back again. And while England basks in glorious April rain (which doesn't seem to have been notified of the change of month) I thought I'd try to bring a little Iberian sunshine to my life and to yours, by posting an AOTW that I have been meaning to include in this blog for almost as long as I've been doing it. This week's animal is quite simply one of the most beautiful things I have never seen, and just a couple of years ago, few stood a chance of ever seeing Lynx pardinus.

The Iberian lynx is one of four species of lynx, including the Eurasian and Canadian lynxes and the bobcat. The lynxes are best known for their impressive facial hair and black ear tufts. Despite my own adventures in pogonophilia and the increasing prominence of my ear hair, I am not a lynx (rather depressingly my ear hair is mostly grey).

The Iberian lynx deserves special mention as it is the most endangered of all the big cat species (the Siberian tiger and Amur leopard, although vanishingly rare, are not distinct enough from other tigers or leopards, respectively obvs, to be considered species). Once scattered widely across the Iberian peninsular, the Iberian lynx is now found only in Donana national park near Seville and the Sierra Morena mountain range. Like money and Madeline McCann, it vanished from Portugal. If it were to become extinct it would be perhaps the first big cat to do so since the sabre toothed tiger (Smilodon).

In 2005 there was a population of just 100 or so in the wild, which has increased to perhaps 300 in the past few years. In 2012, the numbers have increased once again, with the release of captive bred individuals in April. With ongoing and quite productive captive breeding programmes in both Portugal and Spain, the outlook is less bleak, but still not assured for this stunning feline.