July 1, 2020
Australia has a species of bees called Tetragonula Carbonaria. These stingless species of bee are creating what you can say is amazing, mind-boggling spiral structured hives leaving scientists in a confused and fascinating state. The structures that these intelligent bees are creating are to be seen to believe.
Think about a fat belly-shape bottle of naturally sweet, golden liquid sitting in the cupboard at home. It’s filled with honey, a sticky, thick substance that you might use as a sweet addition to your tea or toast and other culinary. This sticky fluid actually comes from the nectar of the bloomed flowers of various colours and flavours that bees produce and store honey to use as sustenance when other food is scarce.
Necter is collected from the pollinators into beehives, later processed into the bottles labeled as HONEY.
Beehives are constructed differently, depending on the species that’s building them. Stingless bees are closely related to common honeybees, carpenter bees, orchid bees, and bumblebees. They have strict hierarchies like any other apian species.
Hive Time
Stingless bees naturally nest in hollow trunks, tree branches, and rock crevices; if available, they’ll go for manmade cavities. Commercial honey producers keep common honeybees in boxes layered with removable screens, but stingless honeybees have a different way of architecting their hives.
Stingless bees store pollen and honey in honeycomb cells, which they make by chewing wax and bonding it into egg-shape pots. Some species clump small, grape-like cells together, while others arrange them in horizontal lines. The carbonaria species, however, builds its hive in a clockwise spiral, regardless of the shape of the box it’s kept in.
Carbonaria bee hives are broad, flat, spiral constructions that gradually ascend. In these complex hives, individual cells must be built at different heights in order to keep the structure going.
There are only 500 species of bees out of 20,000 with these specific features. Their speciality is the way they build their hive.
In this magnificent structure, called a brood comb, each level of the hive contains hundreds of interconnected alveoli. These spherical cells each contain an egg, a larvae or bee nymph, depending on the progress of metamorphosis. These cells are called brood cells.
A multi-stage construction
A bee has to spend about 50 days in one of these cells before reaching maturity. To build each of these cells, the bees secrete wax through their abdominal glands, which they mix with a plant resin derivative, to form a solid material called cerumen.
Researchers and scientists have tried to explain how the bees managed to build this incredible structure. Hypothetically speaking this shape can be the result of random behaviour, or it can be adaptive. A possible advantage would be the space saving and air circulation between the layers. But then, one often wonders, why don’t we see this in more species!!!
Another interesting characteristic of this amazing hive is its ‘anti-enemy doormat’. Bees cover the entrance with a mixture of wax and propolis. This ‘doormat’ has antibacterial features that can get rid of bee’s pathogens. It also prevents predators like leafcutter ants from penetrating the hive and other such insects.