Bees Nature's little wonders

Candace Sherk Savage, 1949-

Book - 2008

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Subjects
Published
Vancouver, B.C. ; Berkeley : Greystone Books/Douglas & McIntyre : David Suzuki Foundaton c2008.
Language
English
Corporate Author
David Suzuki Foundation
Main Author
Candace Sherk Savage, 1949- (-)
Corporate Author
David Suzuki Foundation (-)
Physical Description
127 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 23 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781553653219
Contents unavailable.

From Chapter 1: Bees in the World The Flower's Little Friends Anyone who takes an interest in bees, whether as a student like Lindauer or as a free and inquiring mind, needs to start with a review of the basics--a kind of Stinging Insects 101--before getting up close and personal with them. What is a bee exactly? How many species are there? What is it about these insects that, for so very long, has made them fascinating to humans? As Professor von Frisch once pointed out, "bees are as old as the hills." When the first Homo sapiens woke up and smelled the roses some thirty thousand years ago, bees had already been going about their business for well over 100 million years. ("This [antiquity] may be one of the reasons why they appear to be so mature," von Frisch noted, and "so perfect in many ways.") The oldest known fossilized bee is a tiny relic, about the size of a grain of rice, that was unearthed in Burma in 2006. Completely encased in amber, it dates from the early Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus were still stomping through the swamps, and the gloomy coniferous forests were, for the first time, showing the colors of flowering plants. Bees evolved from wasps. To this day, some species of bees are so wasplike, and some wasps so like bees, that it is easy for a layperson to get confused. For those in the know, however, the two groups are distinct. Wasps--including the familiar paper wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets--are predators that kill other insects and spiders, by stinging, as food for their young; they also have a taste for carion and, as many picnickers can attest, for burgers and fried chicken. Bees, by contrast, are herbivores and use their stings only for defense. Instead of flesh, they raise their larvae on protein-rich pollen from plants. As far back as the Cretaceous, the tiny bees of Burma were already equipped with fringes of branched hairs, the bee tribe's signature adaptation for gathering pollen from flowers. Bees and blossoms are made for each other, like the lovers in a romantic song. Biologists refer to this attunement as co-evolution, the long, slow, adaptive interplay among species that could not survive alone. For if bees depend on flowers for food, many flowering plants rely on animal helpers to reproduce, employing them as animated dildos, or sexual go-betweens, to transfer pollen from the ripe anthers of one flower to the receptive stigma of the next. Although butterflies, beetles, and other insects also provide this service, bees--with their hairy bodies and floral fixation--are especially suited to turn the trick and are the most important pollinating force on the planet. You could think of them as the flower's little friends, a dawn-to-dusk call-out service with a high approval rating from its clientèle. Excerpted from Bees: Nature's Little Wonders by Candace Savage All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.