My son befriended one of the leading African elephant researchers who is now one of the big wigs at Disney's Animal Kingdom. When we met him, he explained how researchers used this knowledge to teach African villages how to become beekeepers. Elephants would often trample their crops or other areas of the village, so they taught them how to keep bees around the perimeter of the village. The elephants stay away and the villagers are able to use the honey, etc. as a trade. The net result was fewer elephants were being killed and the villagers gained a new skill.
> Random bee fact: each workerbee trip returns ~40mg nectar to the hive.
And it takes them approximately 1 hour and 1,000 flower visits in order to collect enough nectar or pollen to fill up for the return trip. It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.
It depends. Winter worker bees live several months. Summer worker bees live only a few weeks. (I'm referring to honeybees here, not other types of bees.)
Winter bees have to live longer because the colony has to "hibernate" through the cold winter months, doing nothing but keeping warm, then in the spring it needs enough bees to reboot the cycle. On the other hand winter bees don't have to forage. Summer bees live less because a) they don't fatten up, b) they fly a lot.
It depends as much on weather as on forage availability. If there's no nectar flow during the winter, then they'll just not spend so much effort on foraging, maybe? I'm not sure. Where I am it's hot much of the year, but winters are not a walk in the park for the bees, so they definitely hibernate. (They don't sleep all winter, just they don't go out on cold days, but since it's Texas there are sufficiently warm winter days they will go out on those days, mainly to poop.)
San Diego native here. California bees are incredibly docile and produce honey year-round. They produce more slowly in the winter due to availability but they don't hunker down+expel male drones like in harsher climates.
If you take a California queen to a state like CO they tend to do poorly the first year. They're not used to things like other hives raiding honey stores in winter. It's pretty fascinating!
> It is so taxing that the muscles in their wings wear out after around 2 weeks.
Wow. I know a lot about bees (and kept bees with my father for several years), but never thought about this and of course didn't know the details of the wear effect on wings.
I believe (but might be wrong as I’ve read a bunch of books this year on bees - it’s my first year beekeeping!) that the source for this info is this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29499054
The thorax/wings have a "stroke" limit, and are not repairable after the final instar (i.e. once they begin flying, nothing gets repaired). It's not just flightmiles, any wing usage rolls the lifetime odometer (e.g. fanning, flying, dancing).
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Add Dr. Thomas Seely's "Honeybee Democracy" to your reading list.
I wonder how hard it is to keep your bees from getting "africanized". Sure good if elephants don't spoil your harvest, but you'd like to not get killed tending to it either.
