Bees are such fascinating beings that it would take a lifetime to research and understand their way of life. These chemists of nature help in synthesising new life with their pollen leaden foots.
Bees live in colonies that contain the queen bee, the worker bee and the drone. The worker bee and the queen bee are both female, but only the queen bee can reproduce. There is one queen bee per hive – she is the mom of all the other bees. She is the only fertile member of the colony, and lays about 1,500 eggs a day during spring and summer.
All drones are male. Male bees are called drones. Their job is to mate with queens from other hives. If they do get the opportunity to mate, they die immediately afterwards.
Worker bees are all female, and they do almost everything for the hive. From birth to her death 45 days later,the worker bee is given different tasks to do during different stages of her life. Worker bees are responsible for everything from feeding the larvae (the baby bees), to tending to the queen, to cleaning the hive, to collecting food, to guarding the colony, to building honeycomb.
Our plantation at Siruthuli has played a sweet role in attracting the bees to their midst. The sites at both Anna University Campus and at Bharathiyar University have many hives and the bees are busy buzzing around the forest looking for nectar. The profuse flowering of the little trees has done its part and the bees have swarmed in to build their hives.
These delightful beings have come into their rightful place and it’s our privilege and eternal gratitude that at last we have been able to create a place in this urban chaos for them to nest and build their hives.
Without the bees, definitely humanity will be at the losing end. No amount of scientific progress and artificial breeding can replace the vital role that is being played by the little pollination promoter miracles of nature called bees.Butterflies, bats and birds are the other three ‘Bs’ which together form the 4 agents of bio diversity.
– Dr. S V Balasubramaniam
