At the Edge of the Kalahari: Buzzy BEES and other 'b's of our garden today

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Buzzy BEES and other 'b's of our garden today

After yesterday morning's heavy fog, today there is beautiful blue sky, and warm autumn sunshine....one of my favourite times of the year...as its not too hot, not yet too cold and the plants are all still blooming...and that means the bees are buzzing!

Bees are just amazing creatures. And since there seemed to be an abundance of them in the garden this morning, not only did I take the opportunity to pull out the camera, but I was also prompted to brush up on as well as increase my 'bee' knowledge...and so I thought I'd share some of what I learnt online and saw in the garden today...

*There are about 20,000 species of bees in the world - these pictures are of the honey bee

Cosmos flowers are blooming in our garden currently...and the bees are enjoying them

Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica

Bees have hairy eyes...and they have 5 eyes...3 simple eyes and 2 more compound eyes with hexagonal facets

Only female bees can sting

Honey bees fly at a speed of about 25km per hour and can beat their wings 200 times a second

On a ball of onion flowers

An average worker bee lives for only about 5-6 weeks and makes about 1/12 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime, but in that time will fly the equivalent of 1.5 times the circumference of the earth.

Bees actually have 4 wings

Emerging from a Sweet Potato flower with wings sparkling in the morning sunlight

*Their brain is only the size of a grain of sugar or a poppy seed but they can be trained to detect illness in humans, find land mines in Croatia, build perfect efficient hexagons in their hives to store the honey, have 170 odorant receptors and have a sense of smell 50 times stronger than a dog, and can communicate between themselves via a special 'waggle dance' to tell other bees where to find the best food sources

Enjoying a lavender flower

Honey bees are the only insect that make a food consumed by humans

90% of plants need bees for pollination

Honey bees are not born knowing how to make honey, they are taught by the other bees

It's said a bee will collect nectar from 50 to 100 flowers on a flight from the hive, but that might depend on how the flowers are distributed or their size...while I was watching ones on flowers like the one below, I would put the number of flowers visited on one flight as much higher!

Honey and propolis are two of the few places to find the anti-oxidant and anti-imflammatory flavonoid called Pinocembrin

Beeswax is found in many product we use everyday from furniture polish to lipbalm

Bees have two stomachs, one for eating and one for storing nectar

And nectar gathering can mean going down deep tunnels of the flowers on our 'Winter Showers' creeper that is just now coming into spectacular bloom

Bees have long straw-like tongues called a proboscis, which they use to suck up the nectar from flowers, and they make honey by regurgitating digested nectar into honeycomb cells and then fanning it with their wings

You can just see the pollen starting to collect on this bee that is enjoying a flower on our choko vine, and you can also see the proboscis clearly as she sucks up the nectar

And here is another bee even hanging upside down to collect pollen - which you can see is a considerably bigger load size building up on this bee

A worker bee can carry a load of nectar or pollen equal to 80% of her own body weight.

For every kilogram of honey produced, a hive must collect 10 kilograms of pollen

Beehive 'fences' are used in Africa to keep elephants out of villages or fields

And while I was busy watching bees, of course I spotted other bugs, birds and butterflies...all reminders of God's incredible creation, his attention to thoroughness and exact detail, his creative beauty, his awesome power...and care for all these little creatures...and thus we can trust His care for us too.