Scylla
Question, how do you tell ‘drone cells’ and ‘queen cells’ from the ordinary larvae? I don’t know nuthin bout drones but I have always heard that queens were normal larvae that had been fed up on rotal jelly. how old does the larvae need to be before you can tell it’s not a worker
Interesting critters these bees ain’t they?
Queen cells are larger - they need to be to accomodate the queen until she emerges.
I did mention bumblebees, which I consider more cooperative than social/hive minded. Again, I think most species only have 5-10 in a loosely cohabiting group.
The same goes for sweat bees IIRC correctly. Species range from solitary to loose knit groups.
The most organized sweat bees will be about as organized as carpenter or bumblebees, which is somewhat less than a pack of dogs, displaying a loose division of labor but little or no communication.
Again, to my thinking, not a hivebuilding organism.
We do have wasps which organize into cooperative hives indigenous to N. America though.
Some of the sweat bees get a lot beyond dogs, with designated queens and sterile individuals. Not sure about communication, which is the last big step into top level community structure, but well on their way to true communal stature even without that.
Drone cells bulge out with large domelike caps. Queen cells tend to be really big, almost squiggly with pointier caps.
You can’t tell until they cap the cell.
With normal bee foundation, it’s set up so all the cells the bees make will be too small for queens and drones. So, in order for the bees to make drones or queens they need to destroy a portion of the foundation and replace it with different cells.
Generally, I just cut these out, and consider it a sign that the bees need more space.
They store the honey partly to build up strength so that they can swarm. Drone cells, or queen cells are sometimes a sign that the hive has a lot of stored honey and harvesting some might be a good idea.
Drone cells bulge out with large domelike caps. Queen cells tend to be really big, almost squiggly with pointier caps.
You can’t tell until they cap the cell.
With normal bee foundation, it’s set up so all the cells the bees make will be too small for queens and drones. So, in order for the bees to make drones or queens they need to destroy a portion of the foundation and replace it with different cells.
Generally, I just cut these out, and consider it a sign that the bees need more space.
They store the honey partly to build up strength so that they can swarm. Drone cells, or queen cells are sometimes a sign that the hive has a lot of stored honey and harvesting some might be a good idea.
I’m not aware of sterile individuals in sweat bees, but will concede to a cite. Most have multiple queens.
Anyway, hopefully you grant my point which is that true communal bees are not ingigenous to the US but were brought here.
That’s like saying that cow’s milk isn’t animal in origin, because it’s made from hay and alfalfa.
You gave me whiplash there, Scylla!
Still, I’m linking to this, as a good page to start to explode ninny-vegan misconceptions.
Apistan is for varroa mites, which are a completely different an much more harmful mite than tracheal mites. At least where I live, you will certainly lose your hives in a couple years if you do not treat for varroa.
But the basic point is quite correct, there would be no live honey bees in U.S. or most of the world were it not for beekeepers.
I’m not convinced - I don’t see the parasite issue as a fatal problem - as the bee population declines, the parasite population should too - in theory it should strike an oscillating balance, at least in areas where the climatic conditions are within tolerable ranges for natural colonies.
It is a bit like the foxes and rabbits model - the foxes can never wipe out all the rabbits, because the more they kill, the less food there is to go around and the fox population goes into decline; the the rabbits can’t enjoy an indefinite population explosion, as the glut of food causes a corresponding population explosion in the foxes.
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I’m not aware of sterile individuals in sweat bees, but will concede to a cite.
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Here you go:
“Social variation in L. malachurum Lasioglossum malachurum has often been
considered the model of a strongly eusocial sweat bee, with large queens
that monopolize oviposition and small, altruistic, usually sterile workers”
Nope I can’t concede that. Some of the sweat bees are obligately social animals. They can no more survive on their own than honeybees. They are true communal.bees, live in true communities and are officially classified as ‘eusocial’ ie truly social.
Here you go:
“Social variation in L. malachurum Lasioglossum malachurum has often been considered the model of a strongly eusocial sweat bee, with large queens that monopolize oviposition and small, altruistic, usually sterile workers”
Nope I can’t concede that. Some of the sweat bees are obligately social animals. They can no more survive on their own than honeybees. They are true communal.bees, live in true communities and are officially classified as ‘eusocial’ ie truly social.
As a non bee person, I’m a bit foggy on how much difference there is between “true communal bees” - which I took to be a conversational way of describing bees that make a big ol hive - and “eusocial” bees - which I took to be a scientific term for bees that don’t fly solo, but don’t necessarily cooperate on a dwelling.
Help? Enlightenment? Clarification?
There are solitary bees that live and nest alone.
There are communal bees that make their cells together in the one spot, but each bee cares for only her own cells and pupae etc.
There are social/semi-social bees where a small number of females do all the egg laying and the egs and cells are tended by non-reproductibve females that are are basically the same as the queen. The non-reproductive individuals may be sisters to the queens or completely unrelated, but they are not the daughters.
There are eusocial bees, where the workers are the offspring of the queens and noticably physically different from the queen.
?? I think the discussion about how beekeeping works is very interesting, and I can see that some of the claims about it in the linked vegan site are misleading.
But I don’t understand why anybody would be confused about whether honey should be an acceptable food for vegans. Of course it isn’t, even if all the bees lead blissfully contented lives and are never harmed in any way. Vegans, as I understand it (and I’m not one myself, but I have friends who are) are opposed in principle to the human use of any animal products. That means honey is out.
Yes, if everybody were vegan then the US honeybee population would decrease or disappear. So would the domestic cattle population, and so forth. So what? They shouldn’t be obliged to support us, and we don’t have to support them.
Personally, I don’t mind a somewhat more “interventionist” approach to the issue of keeping livestock, and I like honey. But I don’t see anything illogical or unethical about vegans’ refusal to eat it. There would still be plenty of other ways for humans to be good stewards of the environment and to live in harmony with nature even if all the human-dependent American honeybees died out.
Great post, Scylla! However, this:
well, you’ll have to take that up with Da Boss.
I’d be cool with that. The cite unfortunately was unwilling to say something of this nature, and instead attempted to justify the position with falsehoods.
Well, this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to correct Unca Cece on the subject of our friends, the insects.
You’ll recall the flea circus debacle, I trust.?
Anyway, Cece is flat out wrong. Words like regurgitate, vomit, and stomach do not accurately describe what bees do with regard to their honey.
What those words do is describe something that humans do. Cecil and others are attempting to apply human behaviorial actions to bees.
The honey stomach of a bee is not a stomach in any sense of the word. It’s a storage sack.
When a hamster stores seeds in a pouch in its mouth is that a stomach?
When you put change in your pocket is that a stomach?
When you take it back out of your pocket, have you vomited it from your pocket?
The bees are not putting the nectar in “stomachs” and they are not “vomiting” it back out. They are simply doing things that as humans remind us of these human actions, so we use human actions to describe them.
As for this:
Cecil says:
This is Cecil opining, and probably facetiously. As the Perfect Master he is surely aware that apeearances are often decieving, or, would he also agree that a zirconium is a diamond because they share a large number of characteristics?
He’s wrong. Pure and simple. He should leave the fleas ands bees to meez.
Blake:
I’m having problems with that cite. I get the first two pages of the document and then it craps out on me.
It does seem though that the species being cited are from Greece and Europe, not America. If this holds true throughout the cite than I remain correct, so far.
If it is not, I will not trouble you to reproduce that cite or find another, but will simply take your word for it if you were to tell me that the document specifically refers to species indigenous to N. America.