Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Terry Ryan Kane

A2 Bee Vet, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement – plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet‐wide mutual mouth to stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

Carl Sagan

More than 120 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth and would‐be mammals were no bigger than shrews, bees flew, and pollinated flowering plants. Bees coevolved with angiosperms over 100 million years, each contributing ingredients to this cooperative arrangement. This co‐evolution was so successful that bees are found on every continent of the world where flowers grow.

We have much to thank the bees for. Beyond the critical role they play in securing our food supply, bees continue to provide a variety of hive products. We harvest the honey they make from nectar, the wax they produce for comb, the pollen they collect and pack into cells for stored protein to feed their young, the propolis they collect from tree resins to line and protect their hives, and even the royal jelly, the “bee milk,” to feed larvae and produce their queen. We turn these into a variety of products: candles, salves, ointments, syrups, make‐up, hair products, medicines, etc.

Bees are amazing and unique. Tens of millions of forager bees may travel up to 6 km to find a food resource before flying home to their hive, communicating in the dark on vertical surfaces to their sister foragers how far away the food is, its value, and how to find it. These foragers utilize the sun's position and polarized light to determine direction with an internal clock/odometer to tell her sisters how far she flew between the food resource and the hive. Humans have almost no innate ability to measure direction and distance, as our huge investments in maps, compasses and now Global Positioning Systems attest. Bees have had this innate capability for tens of millions of years. Kart Von Frisch won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973 for his discovery of the “waggle dance” of the bee. Recent data analytics on the waggle dances have proven how accurate bee navigation really is.