2. Bee sick, anyone?

Bees make loads of stuff besides honey but let's start there.  A colony needs to make about 60lbs of honey to stay alive over the winter and it's a complex business.  A foraging bee uses its long proboscis to reach the nectar sacs in the trumpets of flowers, then stores it in a special, separate stomach, which begins to break down the sugars and reduce the water content.  Once the stomach is full, the bee returns to the hive and regurgitates it into the mouth of another bee, which further processes it while the forager goes out for more.  Back in the hive, the bee then sicks up the honey again, this time into cells usually at the top of the hive.  It turns around and cools down the liquid with its wings to reduce its water content even more.  Once the honey is thick and sticky the hive bee covers the cell with wax.  Job done.

I've been wondering why the Bible would give the sick of an insect redemptive significance: the promised land is 'flowing with milk and honey' for the tribes of Israel, apparently.  Jonathan Cohen, a chap who seems to spend his life being curious about generally everything, wondered too.  He says that honey and milk are signs of  ecological abundance and sexual fertility.  In early biblical times all bees would be wild, according to Cohen.  Wild bees would only flourish where there was abundant water and vegetation -- a flourishing ecology.  A healthy society could be founded upon such fecundity, but not upon the marginal desert lands of Egypt.  So the biblical reference to honey is a way of alluding to the distinction between barren and fertile lands, both literally and symbolically.  Where there are bees, there is life and possibility; where bees are dying, something is going wrong.

Honey is only one of many things that bees sick up.  Another vomit product comes from the sticky stuff you see on tree buds in spring which bees collect and process into a sealant for the hive called propolis.  It's waterproof, light-proof, toffee-like and sets like glue.  To take the boxes from a hive you have to crack them apart using a special tool to break the bees' propolis seal.  Once you've put the boxes back, the bees will soon have glued them together again to keep out the rain.  The propolis seal denies would-be raiders like wasps, ants and other bees an easy way into the hive (although all these can burrow holes through the hive walls if they're determined enough, which is usually a disaster for the affected colony).  If a mouse or other small mammal makes it into the hive somehow and then dies, the bees won't be able to get rid of it, so they coat it entirely in propolis to mummify the problem.  Stradivari used to rub propolis into his violins as a kind of varnish, apparently - this is before B&Q.

The next bee-bleurgh vomitty goodness is royal jelly, a mysterious whiteish vitamin-rich goo that nurse bees feed to all larvae in small quantities.  It's 'royal' because if the nurse bees really lavish it with abandon on on egg, it will grow into a new queen bee.  All bee eggs are made of the same genetic stuff but the enzymes in royal jelly, when present in quantity, activate genes that will turn a regular worker larva into a new queen with its anatomically distinct, sleek body and completely different innate behaviour patterns.  To make a new queen, workers make special, large cells on top of the comb, the existing queen lays an ordinary egg in it and then the workers pour in the magic goo.

It is amazing to me that, given exposure to the right goo, the same genes in an egg can turn it into a substantially different adult body.  This environmental conditioning of growth -- epigenetics or 'creation from the outside' -- makes me wonder whether there might be dormant genes in humans that could be activated by some similar excess of a single substance.  Perhaps a baby fed exclusively on KFC (it's probably happened) could grow chicken wings with their own barbecue sauce glands, for example.

And there's beeswax, which we use to make candles with, or seal and finish wood with a beautiful satin sheen (and it smells of honey, too).  It also stops floorboards from creaking, by the way.  In the hive, the bees sick wax up in little liquid balls which, like drips from a warm candle, quickly solidify into something manipulable.  The bees then use it to build up the comb, plug any large holes in the hive walls or cap cells containing new larvae or honey.

Finally, foraging bees collect pollen in lumps on their legs and carry it back to the hive.  Although nectar is the bees' main source of energy, they collect the pollen for protein, vitamins and minerals.  Beekeepers can retrieve the pollen by putting a special screen just above the hive entrance which scrapes off their loads as the bees re-enter the hive.  Pollen has the most beautiful colours.  Linseed pollen is a particularly soft blue, for example, like a colour from a Monet painting.  I remember looking at pollen grains under the microscope in the lab and it was like looking at a secret garden.  Here are some cuttings from that garden, courtesy of Cambridge University:
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