The Bee’s Needs

February 15, 2012 at 4:14 PM (Environment, Nobel Prize, Worldwide)
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Bees have been buzzing around our planet for almost 100 million years. That’s 999,800,000 years before we Homo sapiens showed up on the planetary bio-map. Related to wasps (yellow jackets, hornets, etc.), there are over 20,000 known species worldwide, and are entirely herbivorous, unlike their carnivorous cousins.

I’m sure we have all been lucky enough to spot a bee on a beautiful summer day, humming happily at any given flower (that is of course, if a fear of bees hasn’t been implanted in us, something I have observed and find rather tragic – fear of nature by her own children). I myself have spent quite some time trailing beautiful bumblebees across the dandelion-rimmed trails in the temperate forests Washington, stalking the bright orange Patagonian bee through the mountain ranges of the Andes – even tending to them in an organic acacia apiary (bee-farm) under the lip of the Alburni mountains in Southern Italy. Their constant dedication to their tasks at hand, the fascinating mathematical structures of the honeycomb, and of course, the dripping sweetness of fresh honey, has captivated my interest and admiration for humble bee.

Their presence across the world, and their importance as pollinators and providers of honey, has likewise attracted attention and praise throughout recorded history.

Ancient Egyptian Relief of a Bee Hieroglyphic

Ancient Egyptian Relief of a Bee Hieroglyphic

From dedicated Egyptian hieroglyphics to countless poems (think Aesop’s Fables, the Upanishads, Virgil, Shakespeare, E.O. Wilson, Emerson, Goethe, Thoreau, G.B. Shaw, Emily Dickinson, and many more), the complex nature and seemingly perfect social balance of bees has fascinated and inspired us for thousands of years. The bee was revered and played a central role in the mythologies and worship of the ancient Mayans, Greeks, Indians, Minoans, Celtics, and many more. Honey was the mystical ‘nectar of the gods’, and the bee seen as a goddess and creator of divine mathematical proportions. And not without just cause.

The bee is a majestic being. In simply preparing for this article, I ended up reading over 3 books and 20 articles – not because I needed to present that much information, but because their social structure and biological development is so utterly fascinating I was drawn into it completely. While we think of them as social creatures, in reality, less than 4% of all bees are actually social. The rest are solo fliers, digging nests in undisturbed areas of ground and trees. This small percentage however, contain some of the more commoner ones: sweat bees, carpenter bees, and the lovable bumblebee. It is this smaller percentage of the world’s bees that have drawn most scientific research and interest, as their social structure, so unlike ours, continues to inspire and draw the curiosity of all.

We’ve all heard of the “Queen Bee”. Almost 2000 years ago, Pliny the Elder was so amazed at the attention the worker and drone bees would lavish on this bee, that thought it must have been a male (A woman? In charge? No….), and referred to it as a King Bee. We know now that it is a female, and she has a majestic hold over the rest of the colony, though she is not the director; a grander collective good is what governs a bee colony, and remains not entirely understood. Prior to setting up her colony, she mates with up to 20 different males, and stores a lifetime supply of sperm in a special sac called a spermatheca. The male bees, called drones live lazy lives prior to this: begging for food from the female workers, living in dirty conditions, and generally performing no duties until mating time. At the mating time, the new queen meets a gathering of about 20 males, at their sexual prime at about 12 days of age. They have cleaned themselves, in preparation for coitus and present themselves for the queen. Many are unsuccessful in their attempts to mate at speeds up to 20 miles/hr in the air (!) and return to their cells, where they are eventually kicked out of the hive or murdered by all the female worker bees (they have been known to have been killed with the stinger of many of the females, as the soft flesh of the bee doesn’t hook and remove the stinger like it does in animal flesh). The successful ones have a short lived victory, as the queen bee flies off quickly after mating, ripping off the penis and viscera in her flight, and leaving the male tumbling to the ground in death.. The hive is obviously a very efficient factory – once your task is over, so is your welcome!

The old monarch, and a good subset of the bees from the colony (roughly 10,000) start house-hunting when the hive is over-crowded. The manner in which this happened was discovered by Martin Lindauer, a renowned scientist, who noticed that the bees had begun returning covered not in pollen, but in soot and dirt. When it’s finally too crowded to live comfortably, the scouting bees (roughly 5% of the hive, or a few hundred) will begin searching around for a new home – knotholes of trees, cracked windowsills, etc. Using an intricate step-measurement system, the bee will explore the space for up to half an hour, to determine if the house is suitable for the hive. She then returns to report her findings. Communicating with an incredibly detailed dance and vibration of her body, the bee reports the size and details of the potential location. If her dance is enthusiastic enough (firm selling pitch!), other scout bees will head out and investigate the location. This of course is incredible, as the bee manages to communicate the location and distance as well with this amazing dance – I’ll get more into this fascinating aspect in a bit. The fact-checkers return, and if in fact agree that it is a suitable location, begin performing the same dance. Ultimately, dancing scouts that aren’t attracting a lot of fact-checkers to their team drop off. The dance with the most dancers win, and the bees soar off as one to start a daughter hive in their new home.

This is in itself fascinating for many reasons, and after investigation and analysis, prompted Thomas Seeley, a biologist at Cornell, and his colleagues to create a set of rules from this social communication and interaction that could greatly benefit humans in their collective reality:

1. The decision making process is broadly diffused among ALL the scouts. Rather than having a small group of bees that make decisions for all the bees, all scouts have equal opportunity to discover a new home and convince the hive of it’s worthiness, thus being open to the broadest possible input of knowledge and ideas.
2. Each individual has her own opinion and doesn’t have to conform to the pushiest bee. All bees that return and report their findings have their opinions second checked by a non-biased bee. The non-biased bee does not have to agree if they find the home not suitable, and in fact this is how homes are selected, as the bee will return and NOT mimic the same dance if they disagree.
3. “The quorum-sensing method of aggregating the bees’ information allows diversity of opinion to thrive, but only long enough to ensure that a decision error is improbable.” This means that all opinions are considered and given equal weight, until all the bees come to a coalesced decision – not a compromise, but the best possible outcome as considered by all.

These 3 social rules mean that all bees can make the decision that will be chosen, all options are given equal weight and carefully considered, and the best possible outcome is chosen by all. If only Harper would take a clue!

Once the colony is set up, the worker bees immediately start preparing the famed and beautiful hexagonal honeycomb structure.

Honeycombs and Worker Bees

Worker Bees preparing Honeycombs

Cells are carefully prepared for the queen, with wax layers for her egg deposits. The queen roams the colony and will select and inspect a cell, using her forelegs to judge size. If it meets her requirements, she deposits an egg. These eggs vary in their diploid and fertilized status – the queen makes a decision of whether or not to fertilize the egg with the sperm she carries, and this determines the sex of the bee. If a male is chosen, the cells are noticeably larger, allowing them to grow into fat, reproductively-purposed larvae.

The food of the hive is provided by the foragers, and this is where we pull our lens of observation back and start to view a larger picture. The foragers leave the colony and begin searching for sources of nectar – flowers. Upon successfully collecting the pollen, they return with a full load to the entrance of the hive, where worker bees collect their harvest. In this exchange is another fascinating aspect of the bee communications – monitoring and control of food intake. If the colony is in need of food when the foragers arrive at the door, they are met eagerly and their harvest isimmediately unloaded. If the colony isn’t in need of much food at the moment, the foragers often have to wait at the door for up to a minute, buzzing around for a worker bee to take their load. If this begins to happen, their nervous system notes the anxiety and the bee begins agitatedly bumping into other returning bees, letting them know the harvest isn’t greatly needed. When their harvest is taken immediately, a nervous system ‘reset’ takes place and they know it’s alright to go back and collect. There is also an intricate dance that takes place at the door if a great source has been found. The bee will come back and begin excitedly wiggling. Through many years of careful observation, the Austrian biologist Karl Von Frisch (who won a Nobel Prize for his work with bees) discovered that the foragers actually denote direction exactly with their dance, and the frequency of their wiggles indicate the distance of the source! (Check out this incredible YouTube video). Other bees read the message and excitedly fly off to harvest from this more lucrative source. Bees have evolved a linguistic communication system that is incredibly precise, adaptive and flexible, based entirely on the motion of dance. This intricacy and evolution just blows my mind.

Macro Image from Nasa's Earth Observatory

Macro Bee Pollen Image - from Nasa

Over a hundred million years, flowers and bees have evolved a brilliant symbiosis. The bee forages at each flower, where pollen clings to the numerous hairs all over their body. When the bee moves on to the next flower, some of the pollen from the first flower is deposited, and so the bee acts as the go-between in the sexual mating of plants. This seemingly simple, yet incredibly glorious relationship between pollinator and pollinated is filled by several other animals, and has been a contributing factor in all the flowers you see (like the flowers you just received for Valentines Day!). While seemingly simple and small, the role of a pollinator is absolutely essential in a healthy ecosystem. Our global plant life depends on this act of feeding and sharing, and without protecting this fragility, the biological health of the planet is greatly endangered.

With increasing urbanization and mono-cropping of agricultural areas, the disappearance of our forests, meadows, grasslands, and biological life make the bees beautiful existence a fragile one. In addition to the loss of habitat Globalization is allowing bee pests and diseases to spread rapidly around the world, wiping out populations internationally. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report calling the decline of populations a global phenomena – see here. The reports tells us that of over 100 crop species providing over 90% of the worlds food, 71 of them are bee-pollinated. Where will the food come from if bees die? I inwardly cringe at the idea of an all factory-produced diet, and hope anyone with half a sense of ‘you are what you eat’ does as well. “Well, that’s alright”, you think. “I eat mostly meat”. But what are those animals going to eat? Synthetic factory grains? The plight of the honeybee is a dangerous reality that we would do well not to ignore. In addition to their incredible structure that we could learn so much from, they literally provide us with most of our foods. Not to mention our gorgeous flowers.

So what can we do to save the bees? First and foremost is habitat conservation . This is important for so many other reasons beside just the bees. Don’t buy the oversized house in the suburbs, decrease your land imprint, and increase the natural, native plant life found on your property. Plant wildflowers around the margin of your property, giving bees more food and brightening up your property as well. Next, alternative agriculture. Again, important for many other reasons. Buy organic and local, and/or grow your own food. Lower purchases of pesticide heavy crops mean less growth (supply and demand), effectively lowering the input of dangerous pesticides and toxic chemicals into our environment. Corporations often spray at pollinating times of the year, killing off these precious and valuable bees as they do their work for a healthy planet. Every purchase of a trusted organic product saves a bee! (No math behind that one, just a concept :) ). Finally, buy honey from a good, trusted local farmer. Local bee farms (apiarys) are havens for many bees – places where the farmer does their best to ensure their health and reproduction in large numbers. Supporting these farmers gives them motivation to keep on taking care of their bees. Additionally, the health benefits of local honey are vast – especially if you suffer from seasonal allergies. Local honey often contains low doses of that which you are allergic to, contributing towards your general immunity. Not to mention – it is absolutely delicious. Heaven can be found in a teaspoon of fresh honey. Believe me.

So don’t be afraid of the bees. Show ‘em some love – they’ve evolved into incredible managers of our plants and food. If conservation efforts fail, the decline of the bees immediately impacts over 20,000 plant species. And each of those plant species will go on to affect huge networks of our interlinked living web – turning the world into a devastated place. They are an important, non-negotiable linkage in the ecosystem of our planet. As UNEP eloquently states, “Pollination is not just a free service but one that requires investment and stewardship to protect and sustain it.”

More info on bees, their goodness, their decline:

Bee Products and Love
NASA Special on Bees
Ontario Bee Info for Kids
Death of the Bees – GMO’s


Go to the bee,
then poet,
consider her ways
and be wise

-George Bernard Shaw

5 Comments

Notable Names: Richard Feynman

February 5, 2012 at 10:03 PM (Challenger Disaster, Computational Science, Fenyman Diagram, Manhattan Project, Mathematics, Nobel Prize, Path Integral Formulation, Physics, Quantum Electrodynamic Theory, Quantum Theory, Richard Fenyman, Superfluid Helium, Weak Decay, Weak Force)

What defines genius? Real genius, not just the smart kid in the back of the class with all the answers. People like Galileo, Da Vinci, Einstein. The brilliant minds that take standard concepts, turn them upside down, and show us exactly why it never made such sense to us before. They take two dimensional images, and show us three dimensional truths.

Feynman, explaining something cool.

Or in the case of Richard Feynman, they take the most basic bits of the universe, and give us quantum electrodynamics. Feynman was a brilliant mathematician and physicist, and arguably one of the greatest science lecturers of all time. Let’s delve for a bit, via Feynman, into the wacky, weird world of energy: the stuff everything you have ever known or interacted with (including yourself, and this computer screen!) is composed of.

Now, I’m no physicist, but listening to Feynman’s lectures and interviews motivates me to learn more about the big majestic mystery of our physical universe. Born in 1918 in New York, Feynman was an intelligent student who had mastered differential and integral calculus by the time he was 15. He was turned away from Columbia University before being accepted at the famed MIT in Boston. After completing his bachelor’s, he then went on to Princeton, excelling constantly in physics, mathematics, and computational sciences. Indeed, his reputation for unprecedented thinking, clarifying lectures, and charming genius was so great that Albert Einstein himself attended his first graduate lecture. He was on his way to revolutionizing the field of physics, generating theories that are still being studied as our technology advances enough to measure it in laboratories. Feynman’s reputation even led him to the Manhattan Project, at the tender age of 24.

If you’re not into atomic or war history, the Manhattan Project was a secret project developed by the American government, that led to the creation of the first atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project operated from 1942-1946 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Feynman was a major contributor in the theoretical and computational division. Feynman has said that his idea of assisting on the project with the purpose of defending the US against Germany and Japan (who were supposed to be racing to develop the bomb first), should have dissipated when the threat did. He continued on with the work, stating that he was driven by solving the problem, not thinking deeply about the moral complications. He was also present at the Trinity Bomb test – the first atomic explosion, and the official inception of the Atomic Age. Shortly after, and despite the pleading of Robert Oppenheimer (head of the Los Alamos lab) to stay and continue contributing, Feynman took a post at Cornell briefly. He claimed he was uninspired by the atmosphere and close to burning out intellectually there, so he took a post at Cal Tech, where he ended up doing some of his best research. This includes:

  • a model of weak decay: The ‘weak’ interaction is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, along with the strong nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity. The interactions of these forces control all the little bits of our universe that cannot be broken down any further; the rules that regulate our most basic building blocks (that we know of). According to the Standard Theory, these are known as quarks, leptons, gauge bosons and higg boson (You may have heard about the Higgs-Boson, as it has been appearing quite frequently in the news. It is the only undiscovered particle of these, and scientists are quite close to finding it, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider’s incredible technology). While gravity is most commonly known force to us regular folks, the weak force controls quarks and leptons – known collectively as ‘fermions’ because they are the two particles of matter, not light. Weak force controls both radioactive decay, and hydrogen fusion – the force allowing the sun to shine, and all life to live. You may not think it’s that important, but without the weak force, there is no you, because there would be no universe, no sun, no energy to get that tan in the summer! A classic example of weak decay is when a neutron breaks down into a proton, electron, and anti-neutrino. Feynman ultimately developed a new and succinctly described model for this decay factor, incorporating ideas that had been lacking before.

  • physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium: Helium is the second most abundant particle in the observable universe, and its behaviour is amongst the strangest of all. It also has the unique property of having one of the lowest boiling and melting points: -269°C and -272°C respectively. In liquid form, helium had been observed to behave rather bizarrely when it was cooled slightly below the boiling point (Check out this excellent video for a visual representation). Feynman didn’t solve the whole problem, but applied the Schrödinger equation successfully to display the quantum mechanical behaviour on a macroscopic scale (I’ll try to briefly explain quantum mechanics in a moment).

  • quantum electrodynamics: This is the work Feynman is best known for, and for which he won a joint Nobel Prize in 1965. The quantum world itself is a section of physics that deals in the tiniest part of matter we know about – atoms. It’s a bizarre world that breaks down all the other rules that govern our everyday life. The five main ideas behind quantum theory are:

    A) Energy is not continuous, but moves in small, discreet bundles.
    B) Elementary particles move like matter AND waves (excellent video explaining this crazy phenomena here).
    C) This movement is intrinsically random.
    D) It is impossible to know the location and momentum of a particle at the same time – the more precisely one is known, the less precise the other measurement is.
    E) The quantum world is absolutely nothing like the one we live in.

    Feynman was one of the founding father of the Quantum Electrodynamic Theory. While complicated, it basically describes (through mathematics) all interactions of light with matter, and of charged particles (a subatomic particle or ion with an electric charge) with one another. It was important because it was the first theory to cohesively integrate Einstein’s special relativity theory into each equation, as well as satisfying the Schrödinger equation (a problem that Paul Dirac and Norman Wiener, two scientists that had developed the theory previously, were unable to solve).

    The three main concepts of Feynman’s QED theory is that: A) a photon goes from a location and time to another location and time, B) an electron goes from a location and time to another location and time, and C) an electron emits or absorbs a photon at a certain place and time. OK – what does that mean? To help explain these, Feynman came up with the self-named Feynman diagrams. Feynman Diagram Elements

    Feynman Diagram (simple).

    The first image shows us the symbols of parts A, B, or C of his theory. The second shows us an example of a Feynman Diagram – an ‘electron-positron annihilation’. Not to be mistaken for a Star Trek battle, this is when an negative electron (e−), and it’s opposite, a positive electron (positron [e+]) collide. This results in the annihilation of both, and photons are sent shooting out from the collision. Feynman’s theories and his well-known diagrams make ideas like this clearer, and more accessible visually to a large portion of the mathematically-disinclined population. Keep in mind, these diagrams are not set paths – just simplified suggestions representing potential quantum relationships symbolically.

    It’s important to note that QED theory doesn’t tell you what will happen, but predicts the probability of what will happen. In quantum mechanics, this means that you add up the sum of all possibilities, to any given endpoint, and predict the probability of the end result based on this total sum. We can loosely think of this as taking a random walk. You’ve had a bad day at work and want to clear your mind. Without knowing your final destination, you decide to cross the road to the other side, which happens to be infinite. Your brain is (hopefully!) measuring where potholes in the road you may have to avoid are, and the probability of whether or not you will get hit by a car. Your brain then tells you when to finally move, and on what path. Your exact footsteps are not predictable, nor is where or when you will step onto the sidewalk, but your brain has calculated the possibilities. And if you were a quantum particle participating in the theory, you would end up with a path and endpoint that were the sum of all possibilities. This computational method was referred to by Feynman as the path integral formulation , and stands in contrast to previous theories that predicted a single, unique trajectory. This formula helps us to understand (or at least diversify) our understanding of the movement of the very tiny little building blocks of our universe.

    Phew. If I have confused you, I’m sorry. I’m a bit confused myself at this point! Particles here, mathematics all over the chalkboard, what does that mean when I need to drag myself out of bed and go to work to feed the kids? The quantum world is difficult to grasp, and I would suspect that it’s still somewhat difficult even for the most brilliant of minds like Feynman. But that doesn’t mean its existence is irrelevant. It in fact informs everything about our lives, our composition, our beautiful planet tucked away here in this tiny corner of the universe. If our goal is to know ourselves, understanding the smallest bits is surely important, difficult as it may be. I’m sure this was one of Feynman’s motivating factors.

    While working on all of these ideas and more, Feynman also dedicated a large portion of his career to teaching. While still at Cal Tech, he was asked to get the undergraduates really involved and appreciative of physics. After several years of work, this resulted in the extremely accessible, beautiful, and inspiring Feynman’s Lectures on Physics which I highly recommend if you have the remotest interest in physics. Perhaps it will clear up any confusion I may have left you floundering in today!

    Now, I barely understand a percent of the incredible problems that Feynman naturally intuited, thought about deeply, and solved. However, the reason I appreciate him and his success as a physicist is due not only to his inherent genius, but also to his understanding of human nature. He was always open to new ideas and subjects, and constantly engaged his whole brain with love, academics, and artists – even creating some art himself under the pseudonym of ‘Ofey’. Watching his interviews and documentaries is always a pleasure, as he somehow manages to circumvent the common way of thinking, and present what have otherwise been very difficult concepts as clear and simple. Feynman has always managed to grasp the type of mind required to appreciate the universe – curious and humourous. As one of his colleagues best described, when you hear Feynman speak, you understand clearly the science behind physics. Once you leave the room however, you find yourself struggling to follow the same pathway that Feynman drew in your brain. I’d suspect it’s because few of us have ever taken that path before, and were so amazed by the beautiful things Feynman was showing us, that we forgot to remember the path. If we were to work hard enough though, we may be able to figure out the average probability to get back (A Feynman pun!).

    Richard Fenyman continued to revolutionize and bring physics to light (another pun!) for the rest of us. He worked on the Challenger disaster of ’86, and raised awareness of the huge discrepancies between the NASA management teams and their poorly informed understanding of physics. In his rather stark review, he says quite truthfully, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

    Feynman died from several forms rare cancers at the age of 69, in Los Angeles. His last words, in true humourous form, “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”

    In memory of true genius, Richard P. Feynman 1918-1988.

    Genius

    What is necessary “for the very existence of science” and so forth, and what the characteristics of nature are, are not to be determined by pompous preconditions. They are determined always by the material with which we work, by nature herself. We look, and we see what we find, and we cannot say ahead of time -successfully- what it is going to look like.

    The most reasonable possibilities turn out often not to be the situation.

    What is necessary for the very existence of science is just the ability to experiment, the honesty in reporting results -the results must be reported without somebody saying what they’d like the results to have had been rather than what they are- and finally -an important thing-, the intelligence to interpret the results but an important point about this intelligence is that it should not be sure ahead of time what must be.

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