“You don't have to have a professor's dome, Not to go for the honey when the bee's at home” – Berlin Irving


Bees are pretty damned impressive you know. Aside from all of the little tidbits about bees that were covered in the last installment of the Epistream, that bolster out own intelligence with useless facts, we never even touched on the Bees' vast intellect.

OK, maybe vast is a bit strong.

But, did you know that it was Bees who first worked out that the world was round?

Take that Columbus.

Bees have quite a complex language system. They communicate through buzzing and "waggle dancing", passing on important information about the location of the best nectar.

We've identified a few distinct types of buzz and have even managed to link these to specific actions or activities.

• 'Fanning', to cool the hive: a steady 250 beats per second
  
• 'Danger', progressively louder, followed by a series of pulses at 500 beats per second to signal the 'all clear'.
• 'Piping', high pitched chirrup by a new-born queen.
• 'Quarking', the response to 'piping' from the queen's unhatched sisters. The new queen uses this 'quark' to locate them and, as there can only be one queen, kill each and every one.

Bees use their legs to hear, picking up the vibrations from the hive. Their antennae, as well as having chemical receptors to 'smell', may also be covered in small, eardrum-like plates. This would explain why workers touch a bees thorax with their antennae during the "waggle dance", rather than touch the "waggling" abdomen. They're hearing rather than seeing directions to the nectar. Which makes sense, as it's probably pretty dark in a hive.

There was a theory that bees buzzed by using the fourteen spiracles (breathing holes on their sides) in much the same way as a trumpeter uses the valves on his trumpet. However, entomologists from the University of California bunged up the holes, scientifically speaking, and the bees still buzzed. Now, the theory is that buzzing is caused by the vibration of beating wings, amplified by the thorax. Clipping a bees wings doesn't stop the buzzing but does change it's timbre.

The purpose of all this bee chatter is essentially to tell one another where the good nectar is. The reference point for this direction is the Sun. What's really smart is that they can do this when it's overcast or dark by calculating the position of the Sun on the other side of the Earth.

So, despite having a brain that's one and a half million times smaller than our own, bees can learn and store this information. In terms of neurons, humans have somewhere between 100 and 200 billion whereas a bees brain has 950,000 neurons.

Honeybees have a built-in map of the Sun's movements across the sky for a 24 hour period and can adapt it to local conditions very quickly. They make all decisions about where to fly within 5 seconds.

They're also more sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field than any other creature, using it to navigate and make the honeycomb panels of their hive. If you were to put a strong magnet next to a young hive, the bees would construct a cylindrical comb unlike anything found in nature.

• The temperature inside a hive is a steady 37 degrees, the same as the human body.
• The Queen produces an enzyme that stops the other bees developing ovaries.
• It takes the entire lifetime of 12 bees to make a teaspoon full of honey.
• They can cover about seven and a half miles in a single trip and will do this several times a day.
• A single bee would have to fly the equivalent of twice round the world to make a pound of honey.