The Unhappy Bee

Bees, by & large, lead sad lives. Most young queens are killed by the reigning queen before they reach maturity. All the mature drones (males) are killed or starved by the workers (sterile females) before winter comes. Most drones die celibate; only one in thousands manages to mate with a virgin queen--and then pays with his life when she tears his genitals away.

The females work themselves to death, wearing their wings to rags on trips to & from flowers. The only pleasure they seem to get is when, as young adults, they care for the baby bees, nursing them tenderly and feeding them golden pollen.

Now it looks as if bee scientists have learned to deprive them of even these few tender hours. In Britain's Journal of Experimental Biology, C. R. Ribbands of the Bee Research Department, Rothamsted Experimental Station, tells how he and colleagues anesthetized worker bees by putting them in jars of carbon dioxide or nitrogen. The bees soon recovered, but with changed personalities. Young workers that had been tending the baby bees forsook their charges and started gathering nectar, to be stored up in the combs and made into honey.* Older workers, that had been gathering both nectar and pollen (for baby bees), usually gathered nothing but nectar thenceforth. The gassing caused both age groups to ignore the colony's system of cooperative reproduction. Only one emotion remained: greed for more & more nectar.

Beeman Ribbands is well pleased with his discovery. In some localities, he says, bees pay altogether too much attention to raising their young, and produce too many of them. He thinks that if whole colonies are doused with carbon dioxide, they will stick more strictly to business, gather more nectar, lay up a bigger crop of profit-making honey.

*Nectar is a dilute solution of various sugars. Bees put it in uncapped comb-cells, evaporate it to honey by fanning it with their wings. If it contains too much sucrose (cane sugar), which would make it tend to crystallize, the bees add an enzyme (invertase) from glands under their thorax. Thus the sucrose is turned into levulose and dextrose, which taste almost as sweet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.