Global Swarming Honeybees: The Lowdown on Landings

1.15.2010

The Lowdown on Landings

If you've kept bees for any length of time, you've probably spent many hours watching your bees touchdown on the landing boards of their hives before scrambling inside to deliver their gleanings. Sometimes, the landings are smooth and elegant, other times (especially when the bees are laden with pollen), the landing is...well...kind of bumbling.The fine art of returning safely to terra firma (if you're a bee) is the topic of an interesting research item summarized in a recent Science Daily article entitled, Final Moment of Bee Landing Tactics Revealed.

How often, amidst the busy days of beekeeping and its attendant chores, do you remember to simply sit by the hive and enjoy watching the bees come and go? One of my New Year's resolutions is to do much more of this in 2010.

1 comment:

Eva Yaa Asantewaa said...: Wonderful photo. Brings back fun memories. Sitting and watching the bees--or the cats--an excellent tonic for the stressors of the times. Thank you for bringing us these images, ideas and values.; January 15, 2010 at 7:40 AM

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Quotes of Note

"The cynicism that you have is not your real soul."—Yoko Ono
"The country that elected George Bush — sort of — because he seemed like he’d be more fun to have a beer with than Al Gore or John Kerry is really getting its comeuppance."—Gail Collins
"How do you inherit the earth? By being awake."—Joni Mitchell
Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form.”—Judith Coche
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."—Philip K. Dick
"A meddling beekeeper is said to be the bees' worst enemy, and this may be true."—Ormond Aebi, The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping
"For too long we have been locked in an old fashioned, reductionist approach, dealing with bees as if they were mere machines created solely for our benefit, instead of highly evolved, wild creatures, with which we are privileged to work."—Phil Chandler, The Barefoot Beekeeper
"Neither among the bees nor any other animals that have a ray of our intellect, do things happen with the precision our books record. Too many circumstances remain unknown to us."—Maurice Maeterlinck
"In these times, acceleration spoils everything."—Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musicologist
"Whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt."—Barbara Kingsolver
"Healthy, happy bees don't need any additives."—Dee A. Lusby
"When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."—Audubon
"There is a certain valid moment for every cloud."—Paul Strand

"For the bee, honey is the ultimate reality. It represents the fulfillment of her life mission, the triumph over her enemies, the continuity of the hive, the justification for working herself to death. Honey is to bees what money in the bank is to people—a measure of prosperity and well-being. But there is nothing abstract or symbolic about honey, as there is about money, which has no intrinsic value. There is more real wealth in a pound of honey, or a load of manure for that matter, than all the currency in the world. We often destroy the world's real wealth to create an illusion of wealth, confusing symbol and substance."—Wm. Longgood, The Queen Must Die