Bees

Local

A long row of black poplar trees escorted my road towards the low horizon. I passed a row of small industrial units, then a house offering rosy windfall apples and pears in a chipped, white ceramic bowl on the doorstep. Voices carried from an open upstairs window, engrossed in a Zoom call about something or other.

A cluster of beehives stood in the corner of a field.The coming cool weather would soon quieten the hives, but today the sun was warm and the bees were busy. They fly tremendous distances, racking up round trips of up to ten miles to forage for food. Each jar of honey contains nectar from two million flowers, with a corresponding flight distance of 90,000 miles, or more than three laps of the planet. Yet each bee produces only a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its life. So it is an extraordinary team effort that depends upon bees sharing information about the food sources they find, by ‘dancing’ for each other.

The waggle dance involves flying in a straight line to show the direction of the food relative to the sun, then performing a series of

loops related to the flowers’ quality. The bee also beats its wings and waggles its abdomen to create vibrations that give extra information about the nectar and pollen’s location.

Bees are cooperative, communicative insects, complete with solar compasses, inbuilt clocks, the ability to communicate with plants via electric signals, and a sting in the tail. They pollinate most of our wild- flowers and many important crops. Bees are amazing. But after 100 million years, they are now at risk as we kamikaze towards ‘insectaged- don’ and the extinction of up to 70 percent of our wild species.