The Incredible Grossness of Life

Dana and I went into the hives yesterday to check things out and add a super (box sans bottom) to the hive. I started with Shera's hive; everything looked good in the hood. I moved to Catra's hive, using my hive tool to pry open the propolis-glued cover. Things looked quite busy, even for a bee. Dana held the surrounding frames down as I pried a fat one out of its waxy thicket. The bees had constructed a wax bridge between the frame in my hand and the one in the box. Apparently, the queen had laid eggs in the bridge. My hand had twisted the bridge in two, releasing two white, slimy, slug-like beings that are called bee larvae from their cells, prematurely. Bee larva in action is gross. They squirm and squiggle and look so exposed next to the worker bees. But that's their destiny. So weird.

"Dana, take a picture of this, this is gross. For the blog and to document it. Actually, this is really gross. Never mind, nobody wants to see this. Ew, this is disgusting, I don't want to see this."

That was my thought process, or what I tried to get across in words, most likely more convoluted, fragmented words, to Dana, armed with my camera.

Queen bees lay eggs in honeycomb cells. Eggs become larvae. Larvae become pupae, or, soft, white bee skeletons with sinister eyes. Pupae become bees, which push their way out of the cells as the fuzzy little buzzers we all love.

I shoved the larvae frame back in place and moved on to a frame at the other end of the super to the site of the potential supercedure cells. Well, it turned out that these weren't supercedure cells; rather, they were either worker or drone cells. Supercedure cells would be much more peanut-like than these cells. Most excitingly, we witnessed the "birth" of a bee: see the little (leg? antenna?) sticking out of the cell? It was just feeling its way into this intricately bizarre world of ours, of honeybees, all animals...

A new friend helps her out.

She pushes herself into the world.

Welcome to our world, small bee.

Hive-Mind: The Man Behind the Curtain

Anthropomorphism is considered by many great minds to be self-indulgent, suggesting departure from truth and marking the human tendency to sentimentalize. But answer me this: how can we attempt to understand animal experience without framing it, in some meaningful way, with human experience?

Dog days of summer finally upon us here in NYC, honeybee colonies are at their strongest in number. The new, spring hive has housed a handful of generations of bees already, and the current inhabitants continue to work for a future that they'll never see.

Each pair of pollen pants tells a story. A fearless forager bumbles home, weighed down by the heavy pants, and waddles inside where her sisters take a load off Sally. The pollen pants will be transferred from Sally's legs to those famous hexagons that all bee fans know and love. Scientists originally thought that long ago, bees evolved by learning to build tiny hexagons when their non-hexagonal cells naturally smooshed into the six-sided cubbies. Now, it seems that the hexagons have always existed; in other words, Ma Nature imbued honeybees with the ability to build these fascinatingly precise wax cells at their very creation.

Who is the man behind the curtain? Who pulls the levers and pushes the buttons?

The Wizard of Oz builds a fantastical world upon an illusion of power. The queen bee (named anthropomorphically... you're busted, scientists...) exerts a similar illusion of power over her human fanatics. We love the Queen Bee... she's a fine-assed woman who won't take nothin from no one. She rules the roost with sass and class, right?

Wrong. The queen bee is more bumbling man behind the curtain than great and powerful wizard. Come on, Sir Francis Bacon and other haters, if you want to criticize anthropomorphism then don't call her Queen Bee in the science books. You might give people the wrong idea.

Although it is unclear who makes the decisions in a colony, meticulous observation suggests that decisions are reached by consensus in the honeybee world. All elections must eventually resolve themselves unanimously. Does one, sole honeybee organize it all? Does this honeybee pass down her role as hive-mind to a future sister by filling a single brood cell with knowledge? Only Ma Nature knows, and she's pretty tight-lipped.

Human cannot master bee. Within their ordered, efficient, just yet ruthless world, the hive-mind of the honeybee is as unpredictable as human history. How can't we anthropomorphize when speaking of honeybees? We're all just lonely animals trying to understand our own finite existences. The honeybee's short yet harried life gives us small, hexagon-shaped glimpses into our own small places in this widening gyre of consciousness.