[dgoodman]

Commuting home tonight (nothing better to do in bumper-to-bumper traffice), I started pondering why bees die. What is the cause of death for most bees? What gives out?

DG

 

[FordGuy]

maybe their hearts are only good for 80 million beats.

 

[Chef Isaac]

from a book I read once, it said that they work themselves to death. Sometimes there wings are frayed, cant fly and go onto the landing board and drop off.

 

[dickm]

Bees don't repair themselves like we do. What they are born with is what they got. This isn't strictly true but it's close. Having no lungs they breath directly into the muscles and other organs, which are few. The flight muscles are the same ones that are used to make heat, so when a bee isn't flying in summer it's working in the winter. Winter bees are special. They retain a hypopharyngeal gland as is found in a nurse bee. (In older bees it changes). Like estrogen this somehow protects against aging. Winter bees also have more "fat bodies" to store energy. These can be given up to make brood food when things are tough. I digress.

As has been said, they die when they are worn out. Not unlike us in that way, are they?

Dickm

 

[Michael Bush]

>Bees don't repair themselves like we do.

That's the crux of it and why the adults don't need protien for themselves as adult humans do.

Humans can repair some. Which is why we eat protien and why we live longer than six weeks.

But we do wear out, which is why we almost never live longer than 110 years.

 

[Robert Hawkins]

<we almost never live longer than 110 years>

Watch me.

Hawk

 

[FordGuy]

well, i am a rank amature, so i probably have no right to take a position, but I do have the right to speculate wildly - here goes.

7% in-flight predation. birds, robber flies, lizards waiting on landing board, you name it.

3-10% varroa, tracheal mites, other maladies

20% wings worn - start home with frayed wings and a full belly. Wings just can't get them there and they end up on the ground and are preyed upon there.

5-10% die defending the hive from me and other skunks.

2-5% pesticide/insecticide like seven in home gardens.

10% rejected from hive by workers that detect geriatric infirmery. haha.

the rest, no clue.

 

[B100B101]

Also, don't forget the drones who are tossed out of the hive by the girls when cold weather's coming, to die because the colony knows that feeding those "playboys" won't help their over-winter survival.

 

[Ian]

>>Winter bees are special. They retain a hypopharyngeal gland as is found in a nurse bee. (In older bees it changes). Like estrogen this somehow protects against aging.

Does it allow the bees to repair or maintain themselves with protiens, unlike summer worker bees? I am assuming this gland is reponsible then for further muscle and wing development after the bees emergance,.

[ December 04, 2005, 09:23 AM: Message edited by: Ian ]

 

[Jerry Simmons]

Some get splattered on windshields.

 

[Michael Bush]

>I am assuming this gland is reponsible then for further muscle and wing development after the bees emergance,.

Have you been talking to Dee Lusby?

I never thought of that.

 

[Ian]

>>hypopharyngeal gland

This is soo cool. I hadnt know of sutch a gland in younger bee, let alone wintering bees.

Why does it change as the summerbees grow older?
I wounder if queens retain this gland throughout her life time? Or maybe it is the younger bees that feed this secreation to her through out her life time.

 

[Ian]

>>Have you been talking to Dee Lusby?

No, Ihave never had the privelage nor even the opertunity to talk to her. But I have read some of her stuff. We might not really see eye to eye on alot of thing, I think.

Why? Whats her take on the whole thing?

 

[Michael Bush]

She hasn't said, but she often asks if the bees need pollen at all once they are adults. Of course the common thinking is they don't. And in the summer this appears to be true. Hive with pollen always seem to winter better and that, of course, is partly because they rear more brood, but do they also live longer overwinter with pollen around. Winter bees are a bit different.

 

[dickm]

>>>>hypopharyngeal gland<<<<

See "Does This Smell Bad" in Nov Bee culture.

This gland is used in nurse bees to make brood food. The brood is not fed pollen directly. Nurse bees eat/ingest it and mixing gland secretions and honey create the royal jelly formula. When a nurse becomes a forager this gland evolves to a new use. It is then a producer of "invertase" which is used to change nectar >sucrose< to glucose and fructose which is honey. Under certain conditions it can change back again.

Clever little girls aren't they?

Dickm