Amazing Bees - Amazing Bees - Beekeepers from Melbourne Australia

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Amazing Bees

Amazing Bees - amazing facts

Honeybees belong to the most amazing animals known to humans and for thousands of years humans have maintained a very special relationship with honeybees. Those who have not been fascinated by the bees themselves have certainly been impressed by the honey produced by honeybees.

Honeybees are social animals, living in a complex society, with a queen, security guards, builders and repairers, cleaners, nurses, undertakers, heating and cooling technicians, scouts, honey makers, pollen stampers, store workers and collectors of nectar, pollen, water and resin.
During her lifetime each worker bee performs a number of these different tasks - and this with the uttermost dedication - never complaining and never going on strike (not as far as we know).

Honeybees build amazing nests, consisting of sheets of honeycomb made from beeswax, produced by themselves. A sheet of honeycomb is a construction of adjacent cells of perfect hexagonal shape, which is the most material-efficient design for a light-weight construction of great strength.

When talking about Honeybees here in Australia, the European Honeybee Apis Mellifera is what we are talking about. Apiarists (or beekeepers) in Australia keep European Honeybees in boxes, so called hives.

◙ The bee has a highly developed sense of smell, odorant chemoreceptors able to sense and distinguish flowers from a great distance. check out this link.

◙ The bee has two sets of wings, which can be hooked together in flight so they flap as one - 16,000 times a minute.

◙ And no matter how she zigzags from flower to flower, she always beelines her way back to the home hive.

◙ Bees communicate information in a symbolic language without match in the animal kingdom - the bee dance.

◙ Bees navigate by utilising the light polarisation in the sky.

The Honey Bee - an Architectural Marvel (clip on YouTube)

The Bee's eyes

The honeybee has five eyes. Three simple eyes that are arranged in a triangle on top of her head help the bee determine the amount of light present. Two compound eyes, i.e. thousands of single eyes arranged next to each other, each with its own lens and each looking in a different direction, help the bee to see objects and colour.

Although honey bees perceive a fairly broad colour range, they can only differentiate between six major categories of colour, including yellow, blue-green, blue, violet, ultraviolet, and also a colour known as "bee's purple," a mixture of yellow and ultraviolet. Bees cannot see red. Differentiation is not equally good throughout the range and is best in the blue-green, violet, and bee's purple colours. Link to source

View the world through the eyes of a bee Artificial Bee Eye Helps Mini Flying Robots See Better Artificial Bee Eye Gives Insight Into Insects’ Visual World

The Sound of Music - by a Queen Bee
Yes, Queen Bees do make sounds on occasions - when you spend time with your bees you might be lucky to hear her.
An explanation can be found in Wikipedia - The piping of queen bees has been published as early as 1609 in a book by Charles Butler.

A fellow beekeeper (Tim Cousins from Nilgiri Bees) has captured the sound of a Queen Bee piping along with a lower frequency response from another queen - two in a duet - an outstanding performance. Listen to this

The Sound of Music - by a King Bee
As we are unable to communicate with bees, our knowledge about them is sometimes wrong. Yes, in beekeeping history there was a time when it was thought that a King Bee was ruling the bee colony !

And then there is this performance by a King Bee ...