Honey, Honey

As my final 30 days in this country are quickly approaching, Sverige is just getting better and better.  For one thing, the weather has been perfect.  The sun has been shining nearly all week, it's 22 degrees, and with the lake just 20 minutes bike ride away (with ice cream conveniently located on the way), life is pretty good.

Rosebergs Slott

Gigantic Viking stone!

Last weekend, a group of us rented cars and toured around Lake Mälaren.  A large handful of castles are scattered throughout the countryside, all overlooking the water.  We ended up seeing three castles, and touring one of them (Skokloster Slott).  It was kind of cool to visit the castles, which all basically resembled large mansions or chateaux.  Skokloster had some interesting history to it and houses many unique artifacts, including North American Native Indian pieces/weapons.  We also managed to find a giant ancient Viking rune stone in the middle of some nature reserve near Eskilstuna (note the beheaded person in the stone's drawing).

Just me and my bumblebee

This week, has been positively buzzing with excitement and new adventures.  I'm taking an awesome course on bees and pollination.  It only runs during the month of May, so every day we are jam-packed with lectures, lab exercises, and excursions.  So far, we've spent a large chunk of our time outside - no complaints from my end.  

Bees are something amazing. They're the only insect that produces food for human consumption, and I've quickly developed a huge amount of respect for them.  This course focuses a lot on identification of bee species, anatomy and genetics, and practical experience with honeybees.  SLU has its own apiary just across the road from campus, and this is called "Bigården" (Bee Garden).  The school bought a few colonies of honeybees for us to observe and learn from.  On our first day at the apiary, I was totally amazed at how close we were to the bees, and how brilliants these insects really are.

Here's a quick lowdown of honeybees:  there exist three types of honeybees.  There is the queen bee, whose sole job is to mate and produce thousands of eggs every day.  Then there's the drone, the male bees, whose jobs are to mate and provide sperm for the queen bee.  Finally, there are the workers, the females, who literally work (clean the cells in the comb, perform construction work, search for food).  Females are the only bees with stingers.

BZZZZ!!!

It's a sad life for a bee. For one, the queen bee just lays eggs until she dies or is replaced by a new queen.  The drones die in a sad way; since they don't perform any work, they are deemed "worthless" by the rest of the colony and are kicked out of the colony as winter approaches.  For the workers, it's a waste of resources to feed drones that don't contribute to the colony's well-being.  My instructor has even seen drones trying to hide from the workers' view, only to be dragged away and out of the colony!  If they don't die in this fashion, they'll die upon mating with the queen bee.  When the drone enters the queen, she twists her body and so the drone's penis breaks off and the he dies.  The next drone comes, pulls out the broken penis from her body, and repeats.  And as for the workers, they literally work to death. Sometimes they die mid-flight, trying to bring food back to the colony.  Nice life as a bee, huh?

The queen bee is pretty terrifying. Once she is born, she looks for other potential queen bee cells (unborn), finds them, and then kills them with her stinger before they can hatch.  

Bees have some cool ways of communicating.  Honeybees dance - seriously!  They have a bunch of different dances that serve various purposes.  The waggle dance is done when a worker wants to tell the other workers about a source of food that she believes they should collect nectar and pollen from.  She then points her body in a specific direction (based on the direction of the sun and the line of gravity).  

mmmmm...!

In the apiary, we got to see how the bees are working, and also identify the workers from the drones, and the queen bee from all of the other honeybees.  We also got taste sticky, drippy, warm, and oh-so-sweet honey fresh from the comb (my favourite part).  A few days ago, we gave a try at queen bee rearing.  Essentially, we wanted to initiate the development of a new queen bee.  So what we had to do was remove all combs from the colony that contained worker (female) larvae, and also remove the present queen bee.  We move the present queen bee to a new colony.  So now, we had a colony with no more female cells and no more queen.  This disrupted the colony and you could actually see, within minutes, the bees acting agitated and trying to figure out what was happening; they could sense that the queen bee was missing.  And without a queen bee to lay eggs, the colony is in big trouble!

Scooping out the larve. Can't have shaky hands here!

Don't freak out, though. It was our turn, us students, to "create" our own queen bee.  We did this by forming our own wax cells on the comb, and then scooping out worker larvae and transferring them to the wax cells. The larvae are tiny and very delicate, so I think I killed a few with my extremely shaky hands (at least now I know for sure I could never be a surgeon).  We then placed this comb back into the colony.  Again, within minutes, the honeybees were changing their behaviour; now, they were waving their wings and acting "happy" again.  Yay! 

Bee hunters

Woohoo, new bee species!  It doesn't take much to excite us.

We also went bee hunting with an entomologist, trudging through campus and also to other parts of Uppsala to find various species of bumblebees.  It's amazing that there are so many different colours and sizes and types of bees that I've never noticed until now.  There's even one with a red spot on the body, called "Hemorrhoid Bee." Haha.

I could probably write even more about bees cause they're just so so so cool little buggers.  But I think it's time to finish this post since it's quite late and it's time for some shut eye!