Ive nine hives for the honey bee in my garden, as well as all the others out in the cider orchards, and usually only one bean row. And on the last day of February it was bee-loud alright, one of the best first signs of spring, even more encouraging than the first squashed badger, or crop-spraying rigs running around the roads. I heard the bees foraging for pollen and nectar in the flowers of the Cherry Plum, a strange tree you might mistake for Blackthorn except it has no thorns. It has profuse flowers so early in the year that the frost usually kills any fruit before it starts developing. Which is why it is probably ten years since I made my last Cherry Plum Pie.
When I was a boy, beekeepers were mostly old boys with beards and straw hats, who looked as if they could moonlight as vicars - apart from my father, who kept bees but abjured both beards and vicars. And no-one seemed to have realised that bees were fascinating, apart from those old beekeepers. A lot of them, like that uncle of Bertie Wooster who collected antique silverware, were liable to get ‘a bit informative’ on the subject of bees. Nowadays many vicars and beekeepers are women, and we are all, including the bees, the better for it.
The bees have been clustered in the hives all winter, in a rough sphere intersected by the hanging wax combs. These are, apart from the queen, special bees that can survive a whole winter. They have reserves of fat, and larger rectums than the summer bees, so that they don’t get caught short inside the hive. Their capacious rectums allow them to wait for a warm day to leave the hive on a ‘cleansing flight’. It’s a good idea to take the washing in before celebrating the first bee day of spring, and hoping that the queen will now be laying the eggs that will be raised as summer bees, to spend three weeks doing the chores in the hive before wearing themselves out for three weeks flying to the flowers and bringing back the nectar and pollen that the hive needs to survive.
Most of the relatives of bees are carnivorous, like ants and wasps, and the ‘decision’ of the bees to go vegan should encourage modern vegans, because it changed the world. When 50 million years ago they began to harvest nectar as their carbohydrate source and pollen as their protein, they set off the evolution of the profusion of flowering plants that exists now. Plants started to evolve to attract bees, developing shapes that accommodated bees’ bodies, and colours that appealed to bees. Like modern vegans, bees were particularly dependent on the legumes, such as clover, the plants that produce peas and beans and lentils. But all flowering plants have evolved to attract insects that will put their pollen about for them, and their colours and shapes will have evolved to suit particular insect pollinators. My father showed me one of the most extraordinary cases, the common Early Purple Orchids that have stamens with a glue sac that sticks them, like horns, to the head of the first bumblebee to enter the flower, so that they will fertilise the next orchid flower the bee visits. He demonstrated by sticking a pencil in the flower and bringing it out with the stamens stuck on, just as Charles Darwin had done when he discovered it a hundred years before. Part of the co-evolution is that bees tend to work one kind of flower at a time, so that the bee with the stamens on its head will almost certainly go on to fertilise another orchid. Charles Darwin’s discovery of this was an important part of the development of his theories about evolution, and led to his becoming convinced that each species was pollinated by insects that specialised in them – in effect that the relationship between flower and pollinator was as intimate and precise as that of a lock and a key. ( On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, 1862).
Being a beekeeper and knowing such things puts you in a special relationship with nature. When you see the bees taking in pollen you can often tell by the colour of their pollen baskets where they are getting the pollen. Some is red, some yellow, and there are green and purple pollens. Sometimes the whole body of the bee is dusted with pollen. When there is a honey flow and the bees are roaring in the lime trees or the sweet chestnuts you can smell the particular aroma of the honey they are ripening. All summer you watch the countryside with a beekeeper’s eye, and listen to their buzzing with a beekeeper’s ear. I can tell my bees are swarming by the note they buzz, and there’s another note for a honeyflow.
As a result of going vegan bees could now store a food supply to last the winter. Ants and wasps had to evolve a way for the species to survive winters without food. Wasps have to start again every spring with single queen wasps starting new colonies when they wake from hibernation. Honey bees have a fully-functioning colony ready to get going in the first spring days. I’m tempted not to say they can hit the ground running. In fact I’m certainly not going to say it.
Bee colonies are able to survive the winter here, and in places like Manitoba, because for them honey is heater fuel as well as food. In the winter cluster of bees some become heater bees, decoupling their wings and vibrating their flight muscles to produce heat to warm the cluster. And there are refuelling bees that fetch honey to the heater bees to keep them going. They maintain a minimum temperature all winter (treating themselves to a burst of extra heat every few days), to keep them all alive while economising on precious honey. And now, when they have decided that it’s springtime, they warm the hive back up to pretty much mammalian blood-heat and keep it there, because they now have a queen who is laying eggs again, and there will be grubs to raise and to keep warm. In the mornings the metal roofs of the hives will have a dry patch in the middle where the warmth rising from the colony has evaporated the dew. The bees now need a lot of pollen, to make the food for the larvae of the new summer bees that are hatching in the combs in the centre of the brood nest. On warm spring days bees can be seen bustling in through the hive entrances with the pollen ‘baskets’ on two of their legs bulging with pollen. They feed the young bees with honey, too, and the young bees hatch out into a pool of royal jelly, a secretion from glands in the heads of the nurse bees.
Wasps have a very different springtime. The queen is all alone, and has to chew a lot of wood to make paper for a hanging paper ball of a nest with just four cells hanging by a paper thread. She lays eggs and provides some food around the eggs from her own bodily reserves, and curls around the hanging thread above them to incubate the eggs. With luck she produces four worker wasps to help her build up the size of the nest but it is some time before there are enough wasps for a fully functioning colony, and the survival of the nest must hang by a thread. If the colony succeeds it spends the summer getting to the point where it is strong enough to raise young queen wasps and drone wasps, and to supervise the mating flights.
Wasps have wasp waists, and so of course do bees. Bee food, being liquid honey, can pass right through the body, through that tiny waist. Wasps, on the other hand, catch insects and chew them up into a ‘bolus’ or ball, but they can’t eat them because of that wasp waist. They take them back and feed their chubby white grubs which do not have a waist at all, and the grubs in return secrete a nutritious liquid from their heads which feeds the adult wasps. This rather bizarre system works quite well for most of the summer, when the purpose of the wasp colony is to produce new queen wasps, and arrange for them to be fertilised with enough semen to last them during the next summer. Then the work is over, the old queen wasp dies, the young queens prepare to hibernate, and the last generation of grubs still pupating in the nest emerges into a nest with no more grubs, and so no food supply. They have no function now, but they still have functioning bodies that crave liquid food, which is why they end up eating your jam and drinking your Coca Cola, and bees don’t.
So their own bodily secretions are an important part of the diet of bees, wasps and hornets, and I would guess ants too, although I don’t know this. The biggest and most feared hornet in the world, the giant Asian hornet that journalists like to call the ‘murder hornet’, is able to fly a hundred kilometres a day at speeds of up to twenty-five kilometres an hour, often carrying chewed up lumps of insect food weighing maybe half its own weight for the grubs back in the nest. Like other wasps it is fed mainly from a secretion of sugars and amino acids secreted by the grubs in return for their insect food.
A team of scientists in Japan started to investigate this juice and its apparent ability to give the hornets such stamina and speed, and they started to collect it. Not a nice job - the stings are very painful and can cause a ‘crater’ that doesn’t always heal, and the nests are underground - but they collected enough for Naoko Takahashi to drink it before and during the women’s marathon at the 2000 Tokyo Olympics, taking the gold medal. She went on to use the hornet juice when she cracked the two-hour 20-minute barrier in the Berlin Marathon a couple of years later, and she took another gold in the marathon at the Sydney Olympics. She said that the juice reduced muscle fatigue and improved the body’s efficiency by increasing the ability to metabolize fat and reduce the build-up of lactic acid.
“And best of all,” she said, “hornet juice doesn’t appear on any banned substance list.”
I hope that wasn’t too informative.
Really enjoyed this one, Richard. Feel like your personal voice is very strong in it; would love to hear you narrate it