It cannot be strange to anybody who is well familiar with the contents of the glorious Qur’an that that sacred Book contains 114 chapters. Out of these, six chapters are about the animal kingdom, three of which are specifically dedicated to insects. They are chapters 16, 27 and 29 which are dedicated to ‘The BEE’, ‘The ANT’ and ‘The SPIDER’ respectively. That is a confirmation that the revealed messages of Allah are not meant for human beings alone.
Each of these chapters is particularly symbolic of the purpose for which it is dedicated. But it takes only those who can reason to comprehend them. However, our immediate concern here is the insect called ‘BEE’ about which Qur’an 16, verse 68 is explicit.
The verse goes thus:
“And your Lord revealed to the bee (saying): Build your homes in the mountains, in the trees and in the hives which men shall make for you. Feed on every kind of fruit and follow the trodden path of your Lord’. “From its belly comes forth a fluid of many hues as healing (fluid) for mankind. Surely in this, there is a sign for those who can reason….”.
The Parable of Honey
Honey is like an environmental message. No one can gain access to it except through the messenger. And the messenger, in this case, is the bee. To appreciate the value of honey and other bee products, it is necessary to know something about the life of the bee.
The Bees
Bees are social insects living a communal life under an organized and disciplined government. Bees have male and female genders. Their males are called drones. Their females are known as workers. They all live together in an abode called hive. Such hive may be wild or man-made. Though people had been harvesting honey for thousands of years, it was not until 1851 that the idea of a definite man-made hive came into existence. In that year, it was an American apiarist, Lorenzo Langstroth, who discovered the principle of ‘bee space’ and designed a man-made hive that was named after its designer (Langstroth).
Langstroth’s Research
According to a discovery from Langstroth’s research, bees leave spaces of about 0.6 cm (about 0.23 inches) for the Queen bee to lay eggs within the wax combs. From this research, Langstroth’s discovery made it possible to remove individual frames from a beehive and to harvest honey and wax without destroying the bee colony. Also, through his discovery, it also became possible to control diseases in the hive and to maintain a larger number of colonies. (A colony is a hive that is effectively occupied by bees while an apiary is a place where hives are kept by an apiarist).
Man-made Hives
Man-made hives are of three types. These are Langstroth, Kenyan Top Bar and Tanzanian top bar. While Langsroth was designed in the United States in 1881, Kenyan and Tanzanian top Bars which look almost alike were designed in Kenya and Tanzania in 1959 and 1962 respectively. Each of the Kenyan and Tanzanian hives can contain an average of 20 litres of honey produced and stored by the bees. Langstroth hive on the other hand can contain as much as between 38 and 40 litres because of its double chamber capacity.
How Bees colonize Hives
To get the bees to occupy a hive, what apiarists do is to bate such hives. And to bate the hive, some pure, genuine honey is added to a piece of beeswax and put at the entrance of the hive. Once this is done, the bees will come in their hundreds to colonize the hive. Then, an occupied hive becomes a colony.
The Bees’ Government
Bees are governed by a female monarch called ‘the Queen’. To choose a Queen, a group of kingmakers in the hive meet to select some fertilized eggs shortly before those eggs are hatched. The selected eggs are then incubated royally. After hatching, they automatically become princesses and are then fed with a special food called Royal Jelly to accelerate their growth, strengthen their immunity and facilitate their longevity. After about 16 weeks, one of them emerges as the Queen apparent while the rest are either taken out into new hives outside their the hive in which their eggs were hatched to become Queens or they are left altogether to slug it out among themselves in a battle royale for succession. In such a situation, whichever of them emerges as overall winner retains the crown princess to become the Queen of that particular hive. All other fertilised eggs that are not specially selected for the same purpose are left to grow naturally until they become worker bees.
The Drones
Drones are the male bees produced from unfertilized eggs. They neither sting nor work. Their main duty in the hive is mating with an emerging queen and that duty is performed only once in a lifetime. As soon as they finish mating with the queen, the drones fall down and die as they have completed their destined duty. The queen also mates only once in a lifetime but she does not die as a result. Drones are very few in any hive since the unfertilized eggs that produce them are scantily laid by the Queen. They constitute less than one per cent of the bees in a hive. The other drones which do not participate in mating only loiter around the hive and feed freely from the labour of the workers. The population of the drones in any hive is invariably determined by the Queen which lays very few big and unfertilised eggs from which the drones are produced.
The Worker Bees
The worker bees are female bees. They are produced from smaller but fertilized eggs. It is from among them that the queen bee emerges.
The Queen Bee
The queen bee has the biggest size in any beehive. Her size is about five times the size of an ordinary worker bee and she is the commander-in-chief of the hive in which she lives. Only one Queen can be found in a hive at any given time. And she has no deputy. If two or more Queens should meet in the same hive, they will engage in a fight of survival killing one another until only one (the strongest) eventually emerges as the victor and the reigning queen.
By the natural culture of the bees, the Queen neither mates inside her own hive nor is mated by the drones from the same hive.
Queen Bee’s Mating Time
When it is time for the Queen bee to mate, she produces a glandular secretion with which she sends out a powerful pheromone into the air to alert the drones in other hives that she is ready for mating. A meeting is then arranged by the worker bees, between her and some interested drones, to meet and mate. And the mating is done in the air.
Breeding New Bees
To breed new bees, the Queen bee lays unfertilized eggs in the larger chambers of the bee comb while she lays fertilized ones in the small chambers of the comb. The eggs in the larger chambers are meant for the production of the drones while those in the smaller chambers are meant for the production of the workers. This is because the drones are naturally bigger in size than the workers. Both chambers are expertly designed in the honeycomb by the worker bees for the purpose of breeding. One of the mysteries of the beehives is the building of the honeycomb by the worker bees. Apiarists know that the bees use wax to build honeycomb but they are still puzzled by the natural skill with which those tiny insects do it. An attempt by researchers to manufacture similar honeycomb as a means of assisting the bees in reducing their workload has proved abortive as the bees have shunned the use of such artificial comb as the store for the honey they produce. Honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal cells built by the honeybees in their nest to contain their larvae and store honey as well as pollen.
Division of Labour
Worker bees are classified into groups for the purpose of carrying out specific duties assigned to them. Some go out every morning to scout for flower nectars with which to produce honey. Some are assigned to the duty of picking resin with which to produce propolis. Such resin is picked from certain trees at certain periods of the day. Some others are charged with fetching water to be used in the hive. All of them travel out in groups of hundreds into the wild vegetations or plantations every morning to carry out their duties. And for carrying out such duties, they are called foragers.
Among the other multitudes remaining in or around the hive, some are responsible for security by guarding the hive against any foreign attack or aggression. They are the security officers. Some are assigned to carrying out the conversion of nectars into honey from the flower nectars brought into the hive by the foragers. Those are the corporate cooks manning the kitchen in the hive. Some engage permanently in fanning the interior of the hive with their tiny wings to reduce the heat and neutralize the humidity therein. Those are called ventilators. Some specialize in converting to propolis the resin of trees brought into the hive by the foragers. Those are called pharmacists or apothecarists. Some are assigned to the Queen’s special kitchen as special cooks and they prepare royal jelly for the Queen which is the latter’s exclusive food. Those are called the Queen’s royal chefs. Some are kept at the entrance of the hive for monitoring the environment and for passing any gathered information to the busy workers. Those are called informants. Some are put in charge of nursing the young bees into adults. They are called foster mothers. Some are assigned to the building and maintenance of the honeycomb. They are called colony architects and builders. Some are assigned to sterilizing the interior of the hive ceiling of any leakages therein as well as to embalming any predators that stray into the hive after such predators might have been stung to death to prevent any outbreak of epidemic in the hive. Those are called sanitary inspectors. All of these duties are carried out by the female bees called worker bees.
Scavenging Officers
In the performance of their duties, some foragers do alert others about the discovery of sources of raw materials like nectar, pollen and resin in the visited vegetations by doing a “waggle” dance, which explains the direction and distance of those raw materials. If the source is within the range of 100 meters from the hive, the bees dance in a circular shape. If it is further away than 100 meters, they dance in figure 8 shape. Worker bees, by their nature, do travel very far in search of water or other raw materials needed to carry out their assigned duties in the hive. And they follow the principle of ‘esprit de corps’ in carrying out such duties.
This great division of labour is a daily routine which enables perfection to be attained in the hive. And all these activities are centrally co-ordinated by the Queen bee from her palatial chamber.
Features of the Queen Bee
The Queen bee lays an average of about 2,000 eggs per day. And she lives about 40 times longer than those other bees because of the exclusive diet of Royal Jelly which she takes every day. The average lifespan of an ordinary bee is six weeks. That of the Queen bee is two and a half years but she can live for as long as six years depending on the conduciveness of her royal environment.
Succession Bid
When the Queen bee becomes old or weak and she can no longer lay enough eggs (of between 1,500 and 2,000 per day) with which to sustain the population of the hive, the kingmakers in the hive meet and decide to depose her by jointly stinging her to death. Then, she is replaced with a new, vibrant Queen.
Features of the Drones
The drones are the male bees. They cannot sting because they are naturally not endowed to do that by virtue of the infertile eggs from which they are produced. Stinging is part of the duties of the worker bees. And each of them can sting only once in a lifetime. No bee can sting twice. That is why they move in groups when they are going to attack an object or an enemy. Stinging bees are like suicide bombers. They die in less than 30 minutes after they had stung. On the other hand, by virtue of the queen’s position and the special food she eats, she can sting many times without any fear of death.
It must be noted that the worker bees produce honey and other products for themselves and not for human consumption. Honey is the food of the bees. They work during the dry season and never in the rainy season because they cannot cope with the wind and storm which often accompany rains. Thus, during the rainy season, they concentrate on taking care of the Queen and on nursing the younger bees. Therefore, the food which they had stored during the dry season is what they consume during the raining season. It takes an average worker bee about 21 days to grow into an adult from the egg status while it takes the Queen about 16 day to develop from the egg status to the royal status of a Queen.
Character of Bees
Bees have as much friendly stinging as they have hostile stinging. Their friendly stinging is for healing purposes. Their hostile stinging is like missiles reserved for attack on enemies. The natural sac in which their venom is kept at the tail end of their abdomen is called ‘ovipositor’. Bees also have three ways of communicating among themselves. These are through buzzing by the collective clapping of their wings; through pheromone released by the Queen and through certain dancing styles. They have eight of such dancing styles each with comprehensible connotation. The number of honey bees inhabiting a hive at a time may range from 10,000 to 100,000 depending on the size of the hive and its proximity to the needed raw materials.
Queen’s Mating Feature
The Queen bee mates with about six to eight drones, only once in a lifetime. This is done over a period of two to seven days. And to mate, the queen must fly to at least a height of 20 metres in the air. This is to maintain royal privacy and avoid unnecessary disturbance. There are about 20,000 species of bees in the world. But the most prominent ones in relation to human life are seven. These are Bumble Bees; Carpenter Bees; Honey Bees; Killer Bees; Ground Bees and Yellow Jacket Bees. Some worker bees are stingless. But generally, the world of bees is a wonderful one. It takes those who know it to appreciate its value. Without bees, there will neither be crops nor farmers.
Conclusion
No amount of narration here can expose all about the communal life of the bees. Their story is inexhaustible.
For many centuries, Professors and other intellectually inclined people have been studying the life of bees. Yet the consciousness of this was brought to mankind by an unlettered desert Prophet from Arabia through the Qur’anic revelation he received from the Almighty Allah.
Finally, looking at the communal life of the bees as well as the style of government in the beehive, no sensible person will disagree with an Arab poet who once coined a poetic couplet part of which reads thus:
“…..And in every creature, there is a natural sign confirming not only the true existence of Allah but also His indisputable oneness”.
The truth will continue to thrive to eternity even if the unbelievers abhor it in their blantant ignorance. God bless the readers of ‘THE MESSAGE’.
