Georgia s State Insect: the Honeybee

Transcription

1 Georgia s State Insect: the Honeybee An Our Own Council s Wild In Georgia Junior Badge Resource 5601 North Allen Road Mableton, GA / November

2 WILD IN GEORGIA BADGE: STEP 2 STATE SYMBOLS GO WILD State symbols represent things that are special about a state. You probably know Georgia s state flower, state tree, and state bird; but did you know there were wildlife symbols as well? Discover why these symbols were chosen and how they are important to the state of Georgia. CHOICES DO ONE: Georgia s state butterfly is the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, and Georgia s state insect is the honeybee. Find out why each was chosen and why both are important to Georgia s ecosystems. Do at least one thing that will attract more bees or more butterflies to your own home or to a school yard or other place in your community. If you can, visit a beekeeper or a honeybee exhibit, or a butterfly center or butterfly festival in Georgia. Honey Bee Kapers Girls are introduced to the three kinds of honey bees and learn about the duties of worker bees. YOU LL NEED: 1. Cotton balls 2. At least two easy-to-distinguish scents such as peppermint, vanilla, cloves, lemon (will be put on cotton balls) 2

3 Introduction Leader: The honeybee was chosen as Georgia s state insect in 1975 because of its contribution to the state's economy through honey production and the pollination of more than 50 Georgia crops. Bee pollination is critical to plant and human survival - beeswax and honey are just surplus gifts from this tiny wonder of nature. (See the story An Apple From the Bees, below.) There are three kinds of honey bees within the hive and that all of the honey bees in the colony have different types of jobs. There is one queen, many worker bees, and some male bees called drones. (See picture and Kaper Chart below) Pollination starts when a field bee crawls around a plant blossom and is dusted with pollen. Then the field bee flies over to another blossom with the pollen in her hair. When the bee lands, the pollen falls onto this blossom s stigma. Now a fruit, vegetable or other crop can grow. Honey bees have enemies! Several insects (dragonflies, certain wasps and assassin bugs) eat honey bees, particularly foraging bees visiting flowers. Spiders trap honey bees in their webs and eat them. Birds, toads and lizards common enemies that like to eat honeybees. And bees from other hives may try to steal their honey. Guard bees stay around the hive entrance to protect the hive from enemies. These bees are middle-aged (18-21 days old in an expected life cycle of days) and are the most alert in the bee community. Guard bees will attack if an enemy comes too near the hive. If the guard bees need help, other honey bees will stop their work and come to help defend the hive. How does a bee know who s their enemy? One way is by its scent, or smell. What do the honey bees have to help them smell an enemy?" (not their noses: antennae!) "How do you think the guard bees tell the other bees of the hive that they need help?" (by sending out a chemical message ) Activity: Sniff and Scout Prepare cotton balls with one scent (peppermint works well) by placing a drop of scent on each ball shortly before they are needed. Give each girl a scented cotton ball. Tell the campers that the bees in each hive have their own smell. Have the girls pretend they are in a hive. Ask them if they can recognize the smell of their hive. 3

4 Mark off one area to be the hive. Select several girls to be guard bees. Ask "What do you think would happen if a bee from another hive tried to enter?" (The guard bees would attack because they wouldn't recognize the scent.) Have the rest of the group leave hive area and gather around you, out of the guard bees sight. Select several students to be bees from another hive. Give them cotton balls with a scent that is different from the hive scent. (You may elect to include several alien scents among the bees.) Have the alien bees mix with the rest of the group. Have the girls fly one by one up to entrance of the hive, which is protected by the guard bees. When the guard bees detect a strange scent, they should prevent the unfamiliar bee from entering the hive. Once all the unfamiliar bees have been barred from entry, bring the whole group together and talk about the effectiveness of depending on the sense of smell to detect enemies or unrelated bees. Closing: The Queen Bee Rap Queen Bee Rap Listen to me now I'm the Queen bee Open up the hive and This is what you'll see. Whisper: The Queen, The Queen, a layin' machine! It looks like chaos but that ain't true. It's a buzzin society, Makin honey for you. Whisper: The Queen, The Queen, a layin' machine! It takes us all Drones and workers too. Each one has his job to do. Whisper: The Queen, The Queen, a layin' machine! I lay the eggs One per cell. I know my job I do it well. 4

5 Whisper: The Queen, The Queen, a layin' machine! I'm a lean - mean - Layin' machine. The Queen! Queen, Worker and Drone Bee Kapers Worker Bees The vast majority of adult honey bees in any colony are female worker bees. The jobs of the worker bees are: tending and feeding young bees (larvae), making honey, making royal jelly and beebread to feed larvae, producing wax, cooling the hive by fanning wings, gathering and storing pollen, nectar and water, guarding the hive, building, cleaning and repairing the comb, 5

6 and feeding and taking care of the queen and drones. The Queen Bee There is only one queen in a honey bee colony. She is slightly larger than a worker bee, with a longer abdomen. She does not have pollen baskets on her legs. It is her job to lay eggs. She can lay up to 2000 a day! The Drones The drones could be called the couch potatoes of the insect world. While they wait for an opportunity to mate with a queen, they are fed and cared for by workers, and only occasionally fly out of the hive to test their wings. If no opportunity to mate arises by fall, the drones are ejected from the nest by the workers and left to fend for themselves. A bee is an insect. Its body has three parts, head, thorax and abdomen. 6

7 The bees legs and wings are attached to the thorax. There are two pairs of wings and six legs. A bee has compound eyes but they do not see colors the same as we do. They do not see red. A bee has two antenna which are sensitive to smell and touch. The sting is found in the abdomen. Bees have a long slender hairy tongue called a proboscis that acts as a straw so they can sip nectar, honey or water. Bees have pollen baskets on their hind legs. To help them with jobs in the hive bees have mandibles (jaws) for cutting, grasping, or working with wax to construct the comb. They are also used for cleaning the hive, or for defending themselves. The Life Cycle of a Bee Because bees are insects they have four stages to their life cycle. The stages are, egg, larva, pupa and adult. The life cycle process is called metamorphosis, which means that the form of the bee changes from the larva to the adult. Passing through the immature stages takes 21 days for worker bees. On the first day, the queen bee lays a single egg in each cell of the comb. The egg generally hatches into a larva on the fourth day. The larva is a legless grub that resembles a tiny white sausage. The larva is fed a mixture of pollen and nectar called beebread. On the ninth day the cell is capped with wax and the larva transforms into the pupa. The pupa doesn't eat. On day 21, the new adult worker bee emerges. 7

8 An Apple From the Bees! When you go to the supermarket, there are lots of different apples that you can buy; Red or Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, McIntosh, just to name a few. Each variety of apple has a different shape and color, and a different flavor. Did you ever wonder where apples come from or how an apple tree makes apples? Actually, apples start as flowers on the apple tree. Without the help of bees though, the flowers would bloom and then wither and drop without ever having a chance to become an apple. For a flower to become an apple, the pollen that is produced by the flowers on one apple tree must be transferred to the flowers on another tree. The pollen is moved between trees by bees who visit the flowers to collect nectar and pollen. Moving pollen between flowers is called cross-pollination. When a honey bee finds an apple tree that has thousands of flowers on it, the bee will stay on the same tree to collect nectar and pollen. If most bees stay on the same tree, how does pollen get moved between different trees so that cross-pollination occurs and apples can develop? What was discovered is that honey bees can spread pollen to other bees in the hive. If you ever watched honey bees in a hive, you would see that they touch one another almost constantly. If part of the honey bees in a hive are visiting Granny Smith apple trees and part are visiting Red Delicious trees, there is a good chance that both types of pollen will be on the bodies of most bees in the hive. Cross-pollination can occur when a honey bee that has Red Delicious pollen on its body that it obtained from other bees in the hive, is visiting Granny Smith flowers. The Red Delicious pollen will be deposited on to the first few Red Delicious flowers that the bee visits, and those flowers will have a good chance of becoming apples. This is how plants and bees help one another. The plants make flowers that have nectar and pollen that the bees need for food. Pollen must be transferred between flowers for the plant to produce fruit and seeds so that new plants can be made. The pollen is transferred by bees while they collect the nectar and pollen. 8

9 We also benefit from the relationship between bees and flowers because without it, we would not have apples or many other fruits and vegetables that we enjoy eating every day. Honey Bee Communication: Let s Dance! Girls learn about honey bee communication through two specific dances. This activity offers a glimpse of the cooperative efforts required for honey bee survival. You ll Need: an open area where girls can role-play the dancing bees. Other Materials: 1. Four varieties of artificial flowers (an be made by campers), for a total of 28 flowers 2. Four different scents (aromatic oils such as orange blossom, rose, lilac, honeysuckle, and pine work well). 3. Antennae (girls can make these by attaching pipe cleaners or springs to plastic headbands). 4. Sugar cubes or packets to represent nectar. 5. Honey, toast, rice cakes, cereal and/or crackers (optional) Background Information When a bee finds a bush covered with flowers, or a tree loaded with blossoms, it is only a matter of time before a great number of bees arrive to gather pollen and nectar. Activity within the hive looks something like Times Square on New Year's Eve; thousands of bees going about their individual tasks. How does the first bee let other bees know where the flowers are located? Communication about the location of food is accomplished through a dance language. A few bees, called scout bees, fly around searching for new sources of food. When a scout finds a good patch of flowers, she flies back to the nest. She walks into the hive and up onto one of the combs, where other workers are grouped. There she performs a dance by running in a precise 9

10 pattern that communicates the direction and distance of the flowers to the other bees. The details of the dance were worked out by Karl von Frisch and his colleagues and are detailed in his 1967 book The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Von Frisch was able to watch the bees perform dances by replacing one of the walls of the hive with glass. (See Information Sheet 8 for a pertinent excerpt from this book.) When the food is more than 300 feet away from the colony, the scout honey bee dances in a figure -eight pattern. The bee first runs straight ahead for a precise distance wagging her abdomen from side to side. Then she turns left and circles back to the starting point, where she starts forward again, waggling the same distance as before. When she reaches the point where she turned, she circles back to the right. Depending on how plentiful the nectar is, the figure-eight may be repeated a number of times. The bees can get some information about what type of flower the scout bee visited by the odor of the nectar. The tail wagging portion of the dance indicates both the direction and distance of the flowers. When the bee dances on the vertical face of the comb, straight up is the direction of the sun. The angle the bee runs (from straight up) indicates the angle of the food from the sun. For example a bee that runs straight down when the sun is in the west indicates the food directly east. How long the bee goes forward wagging indicates distance. When the food is less than 300 feet away, the bees omit the tail wagging portion of the dance and merely circle around. The process for locating a new colony site during swarming also requires communication between bees. A few bees go out to find suitable locations. Once located, they indicate to the other bees what has been found and where it is. There can be more than one scout returning from different locations, and somehow the swarm of bees evaluates the alternatives and chooses which one to follow. Introduction activity (10 minutes) Help girls envision the honey bees' environment by reading aloud the passage below: In a faraway field, on a warm summer afternoon, a solitary ant discovers a tasty morsel of food on the ground. Within minutes the area is covered with 10

11 worker ants busily snatching away particles of food to be returned to their colony. Chemical signals laid upon the ground by the first worker were detected through the other ants' antennae and communicated exactly where the food could be found. On this same summer day, a honey bee discovers a rich source of nectar in a new bloom of wild flowers. Soon, these flowers are buzzing with activity as other workers from the same hive arrive to harvest the food. Like the ants, the honey bees must communicate the location to their hive mates. But, how do they communicate the precise spot of a distant bloom of flowers when they must travel there by wing? Explain that all animals have a means of exchanging information with one another. Some use visual signals, such as body movements or facial expressions, to convey meaning. For example, a gorilla beats its chest to intimidate others and to assert authority. Other animals rely on sounds to communicate. Birds sing, coyotes yip, and dolphins make sounds in the airfilled sacs connected to their blow holes. Chemical signals also are important cues that can be detected by the sense of smell or taste. But what of the foraging honey bee? How does it recruit workers to harvest nectar-rich wildflowers far from the hive? Typically, girls assume that it is only the bees' buzzing that conveys the location of the nectar source to the other bees, so they are surprised to learn that honey bees also "dance" to communicate this information to their hive mates. Explain that campers, too, can master the honey bees' dance and communicate information with their hive mates (friends). But first they must create the honeybees' environment. Activity: Beeing a bee (30 minutes) Talk about the different roles of the inhabitants of the colony: the queen, whose job it is to lay eggs, the male drone, whose only job is to mate with the queen, and the female worker, whose many and varied jobs include building the hive, caring for the developing young, regulating the temperature in the hive by creating an air current with her wings, and foraging for nectar (rich in sugar) and pollen (rich in protein). Next, create the "hive" and the "field" in which they will forage. To prepare the field, have girls "plant" four varieties of artificial flowers in different spots around your activity area. One of each type of flower should be placed at each location in the room or field. The field should contain at least 28 11

12 flowers. Spray each variety of flower with an individual scent to help the "honey bees" identify the source of nectar. Place some sugar cubes or packets (to represent sugar-rich nectar) within the petals of a few flowers so that they may be harvested and collected by "bees" who decipher the forager's communication properly. Once the field is set up, distribute a set of antennae to each girl. To begin, select three or four girls to be forager scouts. Each forager scout takes a separate turn searching for a flower with sugar cubes or packets in the field. While the forager scout looks for the nectar-rich flowers, have the rest of the campers dramatize other tasks required for hive maintenance, such as caring for the young and regulating hive temperature with their wings. Have them do this in another part of the area to ensure that students do not observe which flower the forager scout selects. Have the forager scouts return to a designated area at the entrance of the "hive." Here the forager scouts must communicate, in honey bee language, three separate pieces of information to enable the worker bees to locate the flower the forager selected: (1) the type of flower holding the nectar, (2) its direction from the hive, and (3) its distance from the hive. This information is conveyed in the waggle dance. Activity: The waggle dance (30 minutes) Discuss with campers that after a foraging bee locates nectar-rich flowers (those with sugar packets), she returns to the hive and quickly gathers the other worker bees. She communicates the source and location of the food using both chemical and visual signals in the form of a highly stylized dance. When the flowers are a distance greater than 100 meters from the hive, she performs a "wagging" or waggle dance in the pattern of a figure eight. These figure-eight movements are repeated for several minutes and are accompanied by a rapid "wagging" of the bee's abdomen (13-15 times per second) during the straight run of the dance and an audible buzzing sound created by rapidly beating wings. As the bees crowd around the returning forager, they place their antennae on her body, gathering important information regarding the type of flower that holds this rich food supply. The scent of the flower on the forager's body and in the nectar that she regurgitates tells of the flower she has visited. 12

13 Tell the forager scouts that they will perform a waggle dance to communicate the location and type of the nectar-rich flowers to worker bees. Have them dramatize the honey bee's motions by shaking their hips and flapping their arms as they dance through their figure-eights. To communicate the type of flower, a forager scout bee will carry a piece of paper containing the scent of the flower she is sending workers to harvest. For example, if the flower is a rose scented with orange oil, then the paper would also have the scent of orange oil. (Or put the scent on a cotton ball placed in a plastic container.) Worker bees should gather this important information by sniffing the paper during the waggle dance. Encourage students to lower their antennae while doing this, since that is where the bees' chemical detectors are located. The direction of the nectar-rich flowers is communicated during the straight part (waggle run) of the figure-eight dance. Normally, when the waggle dance is performed by honey bees (on a vertical surface) the direction of the sun is up. In this case, the honey bee orients herself by using the sun as a compass. During the dance, she maintains the same angle between her body and the sun as she observed when she collected the nectar from the flower. To simplify the dance, make the direction to the flowers the direction the dancer faces during the straight run of the figure-eight movement. The waggle run also conveys the distance from the hive to the food source. As the distance to the food source increases, the waggle run becomes more prolonged and stately. As a result, fewer runs are performed per minute. For example, if the food source is 100 meters away from the hive, the waggle run is performed 9-10 times every 15 seconds, but at a distance of 10,000 meters this rate decreases to one run per 15 seconds. The "workers" in your honey bee hive must observe the dance closely and gather the information being communicated. "Worker bees" need to ask themselves: "In what direction do I need to fly?" (The direction the dancer faces during the straight run of the dance.) "How far do I need to travel?" (The number of waggle runs performed in 30 seconds.) "What type of flower holds the nectar?" 13

14 (Worker bees will not be able to identify the type of flower until they arrive at the right location and discriminate among flowers "growing" there based on their scent. Time to lower those antennae again!) Conclusion (10 minutes) After each nectar-rich flower has been located and the foragers are safely home in the hive, celebrate the day's harvest with a sample of honey on toast or crackers. The exhausted "bees" are always amazed to learn that each honey bee must visit more than 1,000 flowers in order to fill its honey sac, which is only the size of a pinhead! As girls snack on honey and crackers, ask them to consider the honey bees' activities in terms of the plants' life cycle and the bees ' life cycle. Typical comments include: "I guess the bee is really my friend and not my enemy." "I never realized that all these spring flowers wouldn't be here if we killed all the bees." "I'll never again look at a honey bee and think it just stings!" This lesson was adapted from Science & Children, May "Dancing for Food, The Language of the Honeybees." Jo Beth D'Agostino, Maryanne Kalin-Miller, Mary Keegan Diane Schiller, and Stephen Freedman. Honey bee photo used with permission of P.-O. Gustafsson, Sweden. 14