THE HIVE

The joint history of bees and humans started around 9,000 years ago. We learned to keep bees and to build hives.
The bees helped us to pollinate nearby plants. For an apple tree to bear fruit, the flowers have to be cross pollinated.
This means that an apple blossom must receive pollen from another variety to be able to develop a fruit.
Since bees fly from flower to flower, they make a significant contribution to the autumn’s apple harvest.

MORE ABOUT BEES

A bee colony consists of 1 queen, 200 to 800 male bees, called drones, and 10,000 to 90,000 worker bees. A worker bee is a sterile female. A drone develops from an unfertilized egg.

Bees feed on nectar and pollen from the flowers of different plants. Nectar contains sugar which gives the bees energy to fly and build nests. Pollen contains protein, fat, vitamins and enzymes, providing an adequate diet.

A bee colony uses 30 to 40 kilo pollen in one season. One apple blossom contains 1.7 mg pollen. 100 million micrograms = 1 kilo.

Wild pollinators such as bumblebees, wild bees and other insects are found (or should be found) in a diverse countryside. But when human food production requires large monoculture fields
which all flower at the same time during a short period, there are not enough wild pollinators available. Then honey bees can help. It is said that the yield can increase by 25% if there is a good bee colony nearby.

IN BRIEF

• To gather nectar to make 1 kilo of honey the bees must visit six to eight million flowers.
• The fossil of an around 100-million-year-old bee was found buried in amber.
• There are more than 20,000 different species of wild bees on earth, of which 270 are found in Sweden.
• A honey bee can fly 2 to 3 km from its hive to gather food and then home again.
• A worker bee lives around six weeks during summer. Bees that overwinter in the hive live longer.

BEE COMMUNICATION

Honey bees communicate with each other through dance.
The dance shows other bees from the same hive in which direction
and at what distance there is nectar,
pollen and sometimes even water.
The dances differ slightly depending on the breed of bee;
so called dance dialects.

When bees search for food they use the sun as a compass.
The dance takes place inside the dark hive on the surface of the honeycomb.
The bee dance became known through the studies of Karl von Frisch,
which awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973.

DANCE LIKE A BEE

Do this:
Find the flowering mats in the exhibition.
Return to the dance mat between each visit to the flowers.
Choose a dance.
Dance for as long as you want to!

If you want to tell about food/flower close to the hive:

RING DANCE
Dance in a small circle.
Reverse direction at every or every other turn.

If you want to tell about distance and direction to the flowers:

WAGGLE DANCE
Dance in semi-circles, like a figure of eight.
Every time you are into the “centre” of the eight
waggle your bottom to indicate the distance to the food.
The duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance. The closer the target, the shorter the waggle phase.