baby bee brains

BABY BEE BRAINS

a drone or multiple drones mate with the queen bee
she lays eggs into the cells of the honeycomb
as the egg develops into a baby bee it eats nectar and pollen made into royal jelly and honey
the nectar and pollen are harvested from out in the world
the majority of these baby bees are worker bees who do all the work in the colony
kinda like your wife and mom probably does

they feed the baby bees care for them keep the combs cleaned out keep the hives temperature regulated using their wings to move air when its hot and when its cold forming a mass to keep the hive warm like a blanket
some develop into guard bees
if you have ever personally been exposed to one of these guard bees
which i have
they can be very aggressive defending the hive
they go for the lips the eyes up your nose and your ears
they seem to know where to sting you to get you away from the hive

then
the worker bees that go out into the world to grab nectar and pollen work real hard
in fact when they find a lot of it they come back to the hive
using their movements to give the other bees the gps setting for where the stuff is
they usually die after a month sometimes their little ole wings are just wore out

it takes a good working bee brain to make all these things happen

one worry in the bee world is that the pesticides out in the environment gets brought back in to the hive and is fed via the nectar and pollen to the baby bees
this cant be good for these rapidly growing baby bee brains and bodies

this contamination may be and probably is one of the causes of the bee hive collapse that occurs
where the bees disappear or are all found dead outside the hive

a researcher recently did an experiment where these baby bees in a hive were exposed to a pesticide
other baby bees from other hives were not

the exposed baby bees turned out to be not as bright as the other non exposed bees
they had difficulty forage and finding directions
sort of like what happens when one gets old
the researchers actually did micro ct scans of the bee brains which showed their brains were smaller

all this exposure can eventually kill off a hive

why is this important
without bees we may not have enough food in the world for folks to eat

also
thinking of those little bee brains
made me think of the rapidly developing fetal brain in humans
there is a several weeks of time that is the most important for that brain to develop

what is all this doing to the fetus brain development if it can affect the baby bee brain

as we ask our crop producers to protect the baby bees so they wont die off
remember
that doing this also protects the growing fetus and the growing babies and infants and young childrens brains

this is why i garden organically and try to eat organically

this week i read several pages my mother had written a few years before she died about what life was like when she grew up

her dad was a foreman of a farm in southern arkansas
i think back then in the 1920s they probably were the original organic farmers
using manures and plant residue as their fertilizers
they didnt have pesticides they used back then

im sure the bumblebees were doing quite well on their farms

the organicgreen doctor