"Wanda's Waggle Dance"

Friends just call me Ross · July 20, 2015

The first paragraph of our Watchtower Study yesterday opens with these words:

"Our ability to form mental pictures of things we have not seen is a gift from God."

With that in mind, and with the BORING task of mowing 5 acres of lawn after the meeting, I used my God-given gift and imagined the following:

"Wanda's Waggle Dance"

In the ranks of beedom, there's the Queen, the drones and the workers.

Wanda was a worker bee.

One sunny afternoon in mid-July, as Wanda was crossing M-67, the wind from a speeding semi tractor-trailer blew her a bit off course and she suddenly found herself hovering over acres and acres of lush white clover, just brimming with nectar.

Wanda was in love!

She landed on one of the pink-tinged blossoms and took a sample nip.

It was AWESOME!

Using the internal GPS system, which Jehovah so cleverly programmed right into her bee DNA, Wanda recorded the exact co-ordinates of the clover patch's location and promptly buzzed back to her hive, which was 40' up in the hollowed out trunk of an old tree, about 3 miles away.

Wanda entered the hive and plodded past the dozing drones.

She shared a sample of the clover nectar with her sister-workers and then stepped onto one of the honeycombs--where she began to dance.

Wanda spun two times to the right and spun once to the left, waggling her entire body in a super-excited fashion.

https://youtu.be/OEMg_F1yUJk

For all you wanna-be bees, here is a translation of Wanda's Waggle Dance: Okay, gals. You fly out to the Trout Lake Road, then take a left. Follow the road for about a half a mile and then hang a right onto M-67. It's the first farm on your right. The clover patches are in the lawns in front of Ross Iho's house and the dairy barn. Be there, or be square.

Unbeknownst to Wanda, Ross was--at that very moment--mowing her lawns. Those lush, nectar-filled clover patches were being sliced and diced by six whirring blades of steel.

By the time Wanda finished her waggle dance, and her sister-workers arrived on the scene, there wasn't a clover blossom in sight.

The other worker bees were not amused and they made Wanda sleep outside of the hive that night.

The End

Author's note:

I don't feel guilty.

My mower stops for all pollinators.

I've either saved thousands of bees,

or the same bee thousands of times.

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http://www.bees-on-the-net.com

"When a honeybee finds a good source of pollen or nectar it has to have a way of communicating this to its sisters. It performs a waggle dance on the face of a comb inside the hive, every so often stopping to share a taste of the pollen or nectar it has found.

The direction of the dance, in relation to the vertical, gives the angle the workers must fly to find the source. The ‘energy’ and speed of the dance indicates the value of the source."

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Bees-and-Beekeeping.com

The Worker Bee Does it All

The worker bee does all of the work of a honey bee colony other than laying eggs.

The Girls Are In Charge...

All of the workers in a colony are female, and collectively – in ways not yet completely understood – they also make all of the decisions that determine the fate of the colony.

When it’s time to swarm, the workers somehow decide, and begin the preparations.

When it’s time to replace the queen, the workers decide, and do what must be done.

Worker Bees Do ALL the Work...

Each worker bee is born capable of performing every task that must be done to help the colony survive and thrive.

But though not every worker will perform every task during her life, most will progress through many different jobs. The job that a bee does is determined largely by her age. Each job within the hive has bees of roughly the same age group performing that job.

So a bee will change jobs as she ages, leaving a job as she becomes older than the age range performing that particular job.

The following list contains descriptions of the various jobs worker bees perform. The list is arranged in the order that bees would progress from job to job according to their age.

The youngest bees would do the first job in the list, and the oldest bees would do the last.

Cell Cleaning

When an egg is laid in a cell, the egg grows into a larva which eventually pupates and spins a cocoon, within which it will grow into an adult.

When the adult bee emerges from the cell, it leaves behind the remains of the cocoon along with bodily wastes. These must be cleaned out before the queen will deposit another egg in the cell.

Capping Brood

The cell containing a larva is sealed with a wax capping at about the time the larva pupates.

Tending Brood

Once an egg hatches into a larva, it is a voracious eater.

During the 8 days before the cell containing a larva is capped, it will be fed more than 10,000 times!

Attending the Queen

The queen does not feed herself or groom herself. Attendant bees feed and groom the queen, and even remove her bodily waste from the hive.

Cleaning Debris

Honey bees are neat freaks. They keep their hive clean.

Bits of debris such as dead brood, dead bees and any other items that do not belong in the hive environment are removed from the hive. Any debris that the bees are physically unable to remove is coated in propolis.

On occasion, a mouse will enter a hive seeking food or warmth. If the mouse dies in the hive, or is stung to death, the bees are unable to remove it.

When this happens, the bees completely coat the mouse with propolis, creating a mouse mummy that will not decompose in the hive.

Packing Pollen

When a foraging bee returns to the hive with a load of pollen, she deposits the pollen in a cell. Another bee will later pack the pollen into the cell, using her head to ram the pollen in tightly.

When nearly full, the pollen cell will be topped off with a shallow layer of honey, and then capped.

Stored in this manner, the pollen will be preserved for many months.

Comb Building

Thousands of bees work together to build the comb used for raising brood and storing pollen and honey.

Ventilating

Bees use their wings to circulate fresh air throughout the hive.

Guarding

Every society needs security, and the bee hive is no exception. Each hive has worker bees that act as guards.

The guard bees provide the first line of defense against intruders. They take posts at each entrance to the hive, and challenge anything attempting to enter the hive which is not a member of the hive.

Bees will rob the honey from a weaker hive if they can, and it is the job of the guard bees to prevent this from happening to their hive.

They are able to tell if a worker bee attempting to enter is from another hive, and will fight to the death if necessary to prevent that bee from entering the hive.

Foraging

If necessary, bees will fly more than 8 miles from the hive to find sources of nectar and pollen.

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Bees-and-Beekeeping.com

A Guy's Life, Honey Bee Style...

Male bees are called drones, and their sole purpose in life is to mate with a queen honeybee.

Drone bees do not work; they simply eat, loaf, and fly around looking for a queen on her mating flight.

But with winter approaching, there will be no queen bees on mating flights for months, and so the drone has outlived his usefulness.

During the long, hard winter, the hive will have to survive on the honey they’ve stored up during the summer. There will be no other sources of food during the winter, and if they run out of stored honey before spring, the entire hive will perish.

So the now useless drone bee will no longer be tolerated.

Doomsday!

When their instincts tell them that the time has come, the worker bees – all female, and all offspring of the same mother queen – drag their hapless brothers out of the hive.

If the outcast drones attempt to return to the hive, they are repelled, and so soon die from exposure or starvation.

Fewer mouths to feed increase the odds of the hive surviving the winter.

No Happy Ending for Drones...

If a drone bee does happen to find a queen to mate with … well, that doesn’t exactly end well for him either.

You see, during the mating flight, just as he’s finished mating with the queen, his abdomen explodes and he plummets to the ground dead.

There's no easy way out for male honey bees!

http://honeybeekind.com/