When the truck landed on its side, many of the crates broke open thus letting a number of bees out. Thankfully for all, Mother Nature arrived in the form of rain. Apparently, bees don’t like to get wet and so most opted to get back home!

Are you wondering where the bees were being taken in such hordes? Put that question to the bees and they would tell you that they were off on one of those delightful, field trips. But ask the driver of the truck and he would tell you that he was rushing to deliver the bees, in time, to a labour camp!

Beekeeping or apiculture is the maintenance of honey bee colonies, in man-made hives. Since honeybees alone can make that wonderfully sweet, sticky liquid, the general impression is that a bees are raised in order to harvest the honey.

That is only partially true, because, not all apiarists are in the honey business. Many of them are in the market as ‘Pollinator Service Providers’. Pollination, as you know, is an important step in the reproduction of seed plants. It requires the transfer of pollens containing the sperms of a flower to a structure that contains the ovule.

Many plants use nectar as a way of encouraging insects to stop at the flower. Honeybees gather the nectar and turn it into honey. Bees also gather the pollen which is a source of protein for them. The bees have dense hairs on their hind legs which are referred to as pollen baskets. By rubbing against the anthers, the bees fill the ‘baskets’ with pollen so they can carry it back to the hive. By mixing honey and pollen together, bees make ‘beebread’, and feed the growing larva. As the bee flies from flower to flower, some of the pollen grains are transferred onto the stigma of other flowers and the flowers thus get cross-pollinated.

Bees are flower-constant, that is, when working on blossoms for either nectar or pollen, bees seldom visit more than one kind of flower at a time. In other words, a bee that has started to gather nectar from apple blossoms will continue to gather nectar from apple blossoms until that period of foraging has ended.

In the olden days, when orchards were small, the pollination happened through insects that flew in from forests. But now fruit and vegetable farming is big business and so farmers are prepared to pay for the service and make sure that every one of the flowers produces a fruit. 

Pollination service involves bringing bees in millions to a farm where crops such as almonds, apples, cherries, blueberries, melons, etc are grown. Farmers ‘book’ the bees for a specific day in spring when they expect most flowers to be in bloom. The bees are brought in trucks and released at night. 

How much of a difference do the bees make? The answer is in the result of this experiment. In a certain orchard, one cherry tree was caged to prevent the bees from reaching it. The harvest from this tree was four pounds. Another tree the same size, exposed to bees, gave a harvest of forty-four pounds of cherries!

But of late there has been trouble in this paradise. Many beekeepers in the US have been reporting mass death of bees for no apparent reason. The problem is called Colony Collapse Disorder and, right now, no one knows what is happening. Farmers are afraid that if the cause is not found out soon shortage of bees will mean empty honey jars and empty shelves in the supermarket!

Kamala  Balachandran