Something of a stretch: How a Pregnant Polar Bear and a Queen Bee are similar

In some mysterious way not fully understood by either mammalogists or entomologists, in both cases the female in question has some control over her internal reproductive system.
Female polar bears will come into estrus in the spring, and mate with a male of the species. But then she will – somehow – delay implantation of the fertilized ova until she has gained enough weight to successfully carry her cubs to term. It is not known how she manages this. Does a certain avoirdupois trigger the implantation? Do hormones do the trick?

The Queen Bee, who busily lays up to 2000 eggs a day during the honey season, must deposit either fertilized or unfertilized egg in the honeycomb cell presented to her by the workers of the hive. They are the ones who make the cells of the correct size, smaller for the worker females, larger for the male drones. The workers decide whether the hive needs more workers, or a few more drones to go out and disseminate their genetic matter. The Queen uses her front legs to gauge the cell’s diameter, and then backs into the cell and as the egg passes through her oviduct, she either fertilizes it or not.


When the Queen was mated on that fateful nuptial flight, she stored all the sperm in her ‘spermatheca’. This is a small sac next to and connected to her vagina via a small duct, through which she will discharge the spermatozoa when she determines to lay a fertilized egg.
We don’t quite know how she does it. What chaos would transpire if we mere humans had that ability?

You can imagine how delighted I was when I learned from our marine mammalogist on board the Lyubov Orlova of this quirk in the reproductive cycle of the polar bear, and quickly saw its tenuous similarity to the case of the Queen Bee. I tried to share my enthusiasm with several other Arctic travelers, but just then there were several thick-billed murres flitting across the sky – and they beckoned more than a Queen Bee’s reproductive talents.

The Mystery of Skyscraper Beehives

(For those of you who don’t know, we recently installed 3 beehives on the roof of NRDC’s green building in Manhattan. Here is a link to the Director, Peter Lehner’s (yes, a relative), blog about the bees.)

What I Like about having hives on the roof of a 12-story building:
The elevator

What I don’t like:
Parking

What remains a mystery:
If the bees like the altitude.

We know that a virgin queen on her mating flight will fly up to 200-300 feet in the air, where the drones fly around all day hoping for the arrival of a queen in need of insemination, so that they can fornicate and die. *
It seems incredibly random to me, but it has worked for honeybees for a few million years.

So what happens when they bees START out at 130 feet above the ground? In our three hives there are currently no virgin queens, only the 3 mated queens we installed with them. But things can happen. Queens can die or swarm. And then the bees will force-feed Royal Jelly to a fertilized pupa and create a newly designated queen, or 2 or 3. (Someone asked me if this was like choosing the next Dalai Lama. Yes and no. More yes than no.) And that new queen, a virgin, will go on a mating flight.
So here is the question: does she fly to a designated place – in relation to the sun and the earth - that she instinctively knows? Or does she fly up from her hive a designated distance that she is genetically programmed to travel? In which case, does that mean she will fly around at 400-500 feet above ground, futilely awaiting a lover? I figure that the rooftop of the NRDC building, being one flight up from the 12th floor, is somewhere between 130 and 146 feet high. Bees in nature often make their homes in hollow trees and I happen to know that the tallest trees in the world, the Giant Sequoias of California, can reach an average height of 165 feet. But I have never heard of beehives in Giant Sequoias, though there is no reason I should.
So I wonder: where in nature would bees ever find themselves coming home to a hive at that altitude? What are we asking of them in terms of thrust and lift? By placing beehives on a roof that high, are we thwarting apian sexuality?



*Because, poor things, like the worker bee’s barbed stinger, the male organ is barbed and so it stays behind inside the queen and rips away the drone's inner organs, wthout which he dies.

More on the merits of actual books

In the parental basement a while back I found an old copy of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria. The flyleaf told me it had belonged to my Uncle Claude while he was at Lawrenceville in the fifties, and reading through his annotated copy was heart-rending. First I should tell you that my beloved uncle’s first language was French; he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, went to school in Egypt, then in Saigon, then in California during the war & then again in Cairo (where as a scrappy young boy he got into fist fights with Edward Said – see p 89 of his acclaimed memoir, Out of Place). When his older sister (my mother) left the fragrant gardens of Maadi, with their nights sleeping on the roof to catch desert breezes and their afternoon pastries at Groppi, and went off to Smith, their Belgian parents thought it would be a great idea to send young Claude to Lawrenceville. It was not. He would have preferred building things with his American friends in Cairo, or scuba diving in the Red Sea, or camping in the desert. He would have preferred anything but sitting in hallowed classrooms filled with sophisticated New Yorkers.
Instead, he struggled through Lytton Strachey – every single page bears witness to those struggles as he deciphered the precious locutions, and looked up vocabulary. His penciled definitions adorn the margins of every page: annuity, odious, nonentity, asperity, imbroglio, gyrations, piquancies, exegesis and on and on to reticence and platitude of her phraseology. Not one page is absent evidence of the assiduous study required to read this short book.
Though he now reads the engineering tomes he loves, and journals of undersea exploration, my uncle’s handwriting is still small and precise, and he still uses a mechanical pencil.


Also in the parental basement, on a shelf otherwise filled with 25¢ luridly covered paperback mysteries, and the signature all-white covered French novels, I extracted my college copy of Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, with an introduction by Philip Rieff (best known to me as Susan Sontag’s one-time husband). I cannot even begin to imagine how that particular book came to rest that particular shelf in the parental basement. Inside this classic analysis of the real Ida Bauer’s aphonia (I insert that word esp. for Uncle Claude), her dreams and her sexual feelings for her father as well as Herr and Frau K, I found a scrap of lined paper with my handwriting. On it were written directions to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Carpentaria, California where I got my very first contraceptives.
Because this is Freud, for whom a cigar is never just a cigar, I cannot see the inclusion of this scrap in this book about a ‘hysterical’ young woman as random. What with the word ‘hysteria’ coming from the Greek “hustera” for womb or uterus, that very organ I was striving to keep from becoming impregnated. We won’t even go into the whole sordid history of the attributing female ‘hysteria’ to malfunctions of the womb. I prefer to recall this long-ago extraordinary college class on Freud and Reich (yes, orgone Reich), and the daunting excitement of taking responsibility for my own sexuality. Another good reason to read books, write in books, stick scraps of paper in books, and save the books.

In apicultural news, this morning I watched the queen in our observation hive laying eggs. She walks across the comb checking out likely cells and when she finds one she likes, she backs up and sticks her tail down. I counted and by my very unscientific timing (1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi etc), she spends about 8 seconds laying an egg.

The Emergency Nuptial Flight

After last weekend’s disappointment in the snow department (Washington got tons, we got squat.) it is heartening to see how the predicted “blizzard” of tomorrow is galvanizing our town.
Our town of Hastings on Hudson has declared a snow emergency, and in Ariel Size 18 Bold Font emailed a list of all the streets you cannot park on and reminded business owners to shovel the sidewalks.
The Center for Fiction will be closed tomorrow, and encourages you to read.
Federated Conservationists of Westchester Efficient Energy lecture is rescheduled.
In anticipation of the paper deliverer being unable to deliver our paper tomorrow, the Journal News says it will give us access to their E-Edition. And this is just the beginning.

Meanwhile I fear I may have gone over the edge, Little Blue Book-wise. As some of you may be aware I have been obsessed with the Little Blue Books I discovered in the ancestral basement.

I just took the obsession a step farther. Upon learning of the existence Blue Book #728- Fascinating Facts about Life Among the Bees,* by Vance Randolph and because this precious volume was not among the ones collected by my mystery grandparent, I searched on-line and bought a copy of this blue book for $4.00 (+S&H), which means that I paid 80 x the original price. This is seems ridiculously inflated to me and I assume it does to you as well.

Not only that, but in this otherwise delightful & small book, Vance Randolph perpetrates a myth about the impregnation of the queen. Regarding the nuptial flight he writes:
“Even the pleasures of sex are almost denied the Queen [I love the insertion of almost in there], who often lives and lays eggs for three or four years, but copulates only once. When the queen is about a week old she comes out of the hive for the first time, to engage in her nuptial flight, for there is no sexual intercourse in the hive. After a little coquettish pirouetting about the entrance, she is off like a rocket, followed by every drone within sight, smell or hearing. One of these gallants overtakes her, usually at a great height, and the sexual embrace lasts but a moment. The male is unable to extract his penis from the vagina of the queen, and the entire copulatory apparatus is torn out of his body, dragging with it the other internal organs and killing him immediately. The queen returns to the hive with this whitish mass attached to her abdomen, or to use one of Maeterlinck’s luscious phrases, “She descends…trailing behind her, like an oriflamme, the unfolded entrails of her lover.” The workers pull these organs out of the queen’s body, and her brief love-life – lasting15 or 20 minutes at best – is at an end.”
I could easily be so enamored of Randolph’s prose that I might miss the one error. The queen mates with more than one drone. She mates with as many drones as possible on that nuptial flight, because it is good to vary the hive’s genetic material and because she needs enough spermatozoa to last for all those years of laying up to 2000 eggs a day.
Life Among the Bees came out in 1924, which may explain for this error.

All Aboard Science Reader – Honeybees (Grosset & Dunlap, 2003) has no such excuse. In this book for beginning readers, it states: “All the drones fly after her. Only one drone will mate with the queen.” Did the writer want to sanitize the queen bee’s polygamous nuptial flight? Will we care less about honeybees if we know the truth of the queen’s sex-life? Will we like honey more if the queen is monogamous?

* In the Free Catalogue of 1150 Little Blue Books, published by Haldeman-Julius. The minimum order was $1.00; for ¢50 you could order a leather holder.

The Queen

I am worried about the Queen in the observation hive.
But I don't know which Queen I am worried about.
As noted we re-queened the hive a few days ago with a marked (blue dot) queen from Wilbanks Apiary. CSB inserted her traveling trunk (that wire topped wooden box with 3 round connected rooms) into the hive, and we waited. The resident bees did not seem to be releasing her so we did what we are not really supposed to do, and released her ourselves. Then we waited.
A day later we saw her, immobile, and wondered if she was dead.
The next day we noticed that she had moved from the front porch to the bottom frame, and allowed ourselves some guarded optimism.
The following day she was not to be found at all. We did, however sight a Queen. A queen without a blue dot.
So here is the question:
Is she the new queen who has lost her blue dot?
Is she a virgin queen the bees made themselves (highly unlikely given that we saw no cells at any time)?
Is she something else?
And whoever she is, she is not laying eggs, which is the problem.
The Queen is Dead. Long live the Queen.

a new Queen

We just re-Queened the observation hive. That is, we inserted the wooden Queen box and now we wait for the bees to eat their way through the sugar stopper,and accept her as their monarch. We are of course all aquiver with anticipation. The O-hive lost their Queen a couple of weeks ago and for a while we hoped (somewhat irrrationally since there was no brood to be seen and certainly no queen cells) they might make their own new Queen. Meanwhile, the population has declined precipitously behind their glass walls.
And we wait for her release.

The Queens have arrived

Our friend at the PO called this morning to let us know that the new Queens were here. They are all Italians, all marked with a blue dot. If you enlarge the picture below you can see the dot on the Queen to the left. All the others are nurse bees who fed and groomed the queen during her journey north from Georgia, and will keep tending to her in the days to come; they will munch their way through the sugar patty that corks up the box and release her into the hive, by which time, so we hope, the thousands of bees will have accepted her pheromone and embraced her as their new Queen.

When we first started beekeeping I always named the Queens. Our very first one was Camilla, for Prince Charles' lady friend (I identified with the old farts finding love in middle age). The next ones we named for CSB's old girlfriends from his days in New Mexico. (Not the x-wife, I'm not that crazy.) When we ran out of ex-girlfriends (CSB was debonair but not a Casanova) we named them for attractive female friends. But we kept getting more hives, and existing hives swarmed, taking the Queen off to new digs, and it became too confusing. So we name them no more. But every time they arrive the old impulse rears itself up, the naming impulse, the impulse to differentiate and specify.
A few years ago I was in a bus outside Cairo and another impulse, the curious one, caused me to ask our guide about bees in Egypt. He told me a story. When he was a boy his grandfather had a melon farm beside the Nile in Upper Egypt and kept bees. He decided to repopulate his hives with European bees and so ordered a Queen from Italy. This Queen crossed the Mediterranean on a freighter and then traveled by train down to the grandfather's village. Our guide was visiting the day the message came from the stationmaster that his grandfather's Queen had arrived. He remembers the happiness on his grandfather's face as he said,"My new Queen is here, and she is Italian."
That was the sum total of what he told me about bees in Egypt. I have since learned that there is quite a bit more. The Egyptians in Pharaonic times kept bees on barges on the Nile and when the trees in one spot had finished their flowering, the keepers moved the barges at night to another fruitful mooring.