Читать книгу Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 69

Rolfe M. Radcliffe

Large Animal Surgery and Emergency Critical Care, College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

* Illustrations by Lauren D. Sawchyn

Both beekeepers and veterinarians working with bees require an understanding of the honey bee individual and superorganism. It is imperative to be able to identify what is normal biology – anatomy, function, and behavior – for the individual honey bee and its colony and what is abnormal or unhealthy, to provide the appropriate management steps to control or eliminate a problem or disease. For example, understanding honey bee physiology and communication will provide the basis for making informed decisions about diseases like varroa mite that may affect many different features (e.g. bee weight, lifespan and bee numbers, deformities, behavior, reproduction) of a honey bee and their collective hive functions. Further, a full understanding of honey bee biology will help the beekeeper and veterinarian achieve their goal(s), whether it be for the production of honey, beeswax, pollination or other services.

The honey bee and its collective colony is a marvel of nature. The following passage from The Superorganism: the beauty, elegance and strangeness of insect societies, by Hölldobler and Wilson (2009), eloquently summaries the complexity of such a life:

Consider a honey bee gathering nectar from a flower bed. Although simple in appearance, the act is a performance of high virtuosity. The forager was guided to this spot by dances of her nestmates that contained symbolic information about the direction, distance, and quality of the nectar source. To reach her destination, she traveled the equivalent of hundreds of human miles at bee‐equivalent supersonic speed. She has arrived at an hour when the flowers are most likely to be richly productive. Now she closely inspects the willing blossoms by touch and smell and extracts the nectar with intricate movements of her legs and proboscis. Then she flies home in a straight line. All this she accomplishes with a brain the size of a grain of sand and with little or no prior experience.