Not so busy

I wound up doing a bunch of research-reading today. It was Piano Tuning Day, and I had to wait on the tuner.

(He was later than originally planned, but his wife - who is his receptionist of sorts - called me to let me know. Apparently the piano before mine was really messed up. I just kind of chuckled and said it was okay - I get that having a piano is a luxury, and getting it tuned is even more than a luxury. I'm not quite so patient when it's 105 out and the air conditioner is on the fritz, or if something's gone wrong with the plumbing and the plumber is AWOL)

Anyway, he did arrive, and while he was plinking and twisting away on the piano, I went into another room and read. (Funny. I can tune out stuff like that and concentrate on reading, but people around me talking when I'm trying to read? Drives me nuts and I can't concentrate)

Anyway, I'm reading off and on on "The Biology of the Honey Bee" by Mark Winston. It's actually pretty interesting, or at least, interesting to me. (Okay, so some of the stuff about the fluctuating insect hormone levels didn't engage me so much, but that's because I don't know the functions of them all all that well)

Anyway, a couple of observations:

There's an old silly poem that goes something like "The bee is such a busy soul/She has no time for birth control/And that is why, in times like these/There are so many 'sons of Bs'"

And when I heard that as a teenager, I inwardly snickered - not for the reason you might think, but because I knew that most bees, while female, are sterile - the worker caste of hives.

Well, not so fast. Apparently some of the workers, depending on what happens during development, do develop to the point where they can lay eggs, though the eggs very rarely develop.

(One thing I am finding, comparing what I know now about some scientific topics vs. what I learned in primary grades, is that what we were once taught as "always" or "never" is actually "Well, most of the time" and "hardly ever but not impossible." Nature is so fascinating.)

And also, if a worker larva is moved to a queen cell, or a queen larva is moved to a worker cell, if it's early enough in development, you get either "queenlike workers" or "workerlike queens" (I wonder, is it better to be a queenlike worker, or a workerlike queen? I mean that metaphorically. I'm going to go with 'workerlike queen,' because that suggests you have a fundamentally aristocratic and probably dignified nature, but don't think you're too good to do the necessary tasks)

(The difference in queen vs. worker development is largely how they're fed. Drones - the males-  come from fertilized eggs rather than unfertilized ones, and they also eat a lot more (I am trying not to read anything into that about human behavior)

The worker bees do different tasks in the hive over the span of their life. What task they do is loosely correlated with how old they are - the youngest workers tend the brood cells, then they tend and feed the queen, then they fan the nest (to keep it cool), then, finally, they forage.

Also, and this is where my post title comes from, but analyses of bee activity by time spent shows that most worker bees actually spend a lot of their time - perhaps the majority - standing around or resting or walking around in the colony. (Apparently the "walking around" is kind of like going to the water cooler in a human office: they seem to learn the "gossip" of the colony that way).

In fact, there's some evidence that the busier bees die sooner. (And definitely they do when they age up to being a forager - apparently after flying a certain distance she shorts out the metabolic ability of her flight muscles and dies). And it turns out that the bee idleness apparently serves a purpose - in colonies where a bunch of the workers are lost (to a swarm or to predators), the bees that hung out resting were able to step up and take over the tasks.

And then, finally, another example of "I'm trying not to read too much into human behavior about this" (but it's really hard NOT to) - the author discusses observations of fairly young workers doing "capping" duties (that is, making the wax coverings for cells in the comb). Cells where several workers were working together sometimes took hours to get capped, and in some cases workers took away wax and used it on another cell. On the other hand, cells where a worker was working alone? Got capped in about 20 minutes.

As I said, I'm trying not to see too many parallels to human behavior there....