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'White Man's Flies'
| Article
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16203 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
1,750 Words |
| Author
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Stephen L. Buchmann
Dr. Buchmann is the president of The Bee Works, an
environmental consulting company in Tucson, AZ. He is active
in pollinator conservation, and serves on the steering
committee for the North American Pollinator Protection
Campaign. He is the co-author, along with Gary Nabhan, of
The Forgotten Pollinators published by Island Press in
1997. He appeared alongside Peter Fonda in the Turner Original
Films/NWF documentary "Pollinators in Peril" and is often
heard on National Public Radio discussing bees and other
pollinators.
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Forty-five hundred years ago, migratory Egyptian beekeepers floated their hives on barges along the Nile to take advantage of the shifting patterns of wildflowers on the shoreline. Today, hundreds of thousands of hives are trucked via highways to bring pollinators to diverse vegetable and orchard crops throughout the United States.
Honey bees belong to the small genus Apis in the diverse and advanced family Apidae, which is placed within the insect order Hymenoptera, so named because its members have two pairs of membranous wings.
Honey bees are native to Africa, Europe, and Asia, along with continental islands such as Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and much of the Indonesian archipelago. Previously unknown in the New World, they were carried on board Spanish galleons from Europe to Mexico's central plateau early in the 16th century. As colonies' reproductive swarms left, descendants of these bees migrated northward toward the United States. A typical book on beekeeping lore states that honey bees were independently introduced into the Virginia colonies from England sometime between 1621 and 1638.
Westward Colonization
Early accounts indicate that these early bee immigrants were colonizing new territory at the rate of at least 50 miles per year, moving westward across the Untied States even without being transported by man. Records left by Thomas Jefferson and others inform us that the advancing bee front was often 100 to 200 miles ahead of civilized outposts.
A common Native American expression for honey bees, "white man's flies," used by the Cherokee and other indigenous cultures, is attributed to John Elliot, who was translating the Bible into Indian dialects and discovered that these peoples had no words for honey or wax. Some tribes, such as the Cherokee in Georgia, quickly adapted to raiding wild bee nests for the liquid gold sweets they contained.
A honey bee colony, with approximately 30,000 or more workers or foragers, weighs about 1.5 to 5 kilograms. Only four natural resources--pollen, nectar, water, and plant resins known as propolis--are necessary to support all the colony's activities. Nectar, a mixture of sugars, amino acids, lipids, and other components, is converted into honey, which is the primary carbohydrate source for the bees. Energy derived from its metabolism fuels hive activities as well as flight
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