Beeutiful Bees!
All photos are original and Galactic Gold property. Eugene Lagana is our resident bee photographer who took a number of the photos below. To view more of his work, you can visit his Flickr.
Pictured here is a bumble bee pollinating Echinacea. The vibrations created by her larger body are curtail for the flower’s pollination and a skill only offered by larger bodied bees!
Sedum is one of the bee’s favorite flowers. It grows like a weed and flowers for weeks on end being visited by hundreds of honey bees.
A bee hive is a true democracy where the workers communicate to make group decisions independent of the queen. The title "queen" is a misnomer since she is often at the mercy of these group decisions. The queen above is named Ronda after the UFC fighter Ronda Rousey.
Bees are one of the few species with a division of labor. Here you can see a storage bee receiving nectar collected by a forager. The two will exchange the nectar, then the forager may do a dance to communicate if it was a good source of nectar, where the nectar was located, and if there were any other resources worth collecting. Although many people are familiar with the waggle dance, it’s not the only one used by workers.
A drone is the male bee. Most bees in the colony are female. That’s right, by definition a worker bee is a female bee. Drones serve little purpose within the hive aside from mating.
Apiaries are home to a lot more than just bees. Birds feed off of foragers returning home, spiders take haven in the nooks underneath the hives and praying mantises make their homes amongst the bees feeding on the dead placed outside the hive. These only comprise a small snippet of the myriad of creatures who call the apiary their home. Once a healthy apiary has been established, it often becomes the center of its ecosystem, attracting critters far and wide.
Bees have modified legs that allow them to carry up to half their body weight in food or in this case tree sap. The sap will be brought into the hive and combined with other materials to form propolis. An anti-bacterial coating used by bees to sterilize and seal hive components, similar to a bee disinfectant.
Many people don’t know the difference between a bee and a wasp. The most obvious difference is in their hair. Bees are fuzzy, while most wasps and hornets look sleek, almost like plastic.
While we all benefit from the bee's work, few have seen its face. Bees are responsible for our healthy diet, pollinating over 1/3 of all food consumed as well as plants required for herbivores such as cows, birds, rodents, and other insects. A large portion of the honey bee genome is dedicated to communication, allowing them to engage in complex dances that communicate coordinates and other data in a way only matched by humans.
A colony changes drastically throughout the year. With a peak population in the hundreds of thousands in the summer, however eventually winter comes. The hives must be reduced and monitored during the colder months to ensure their survival. They do not hibernate, but instead form a cluster, using their wings to generate heat.
Pollen is vital to the workings of the hive and comes in a rainbow of colors, which are often bright. This picture doesn't do the vibrant pollen justice as it practically glows in reality.
A hive can have 100,000 or more bees in it during the late spring and the summer months. It is our job to ensure that the colony is healthy and happy, which sometimes means finding the queen. Often, we will have to look at 20-30 frames just like this one in order to locate her. This process can take anywhere from a few minutes to hours spread across multiple days. Can you find the queen in this picture?
