It cannot be strange to regular reciters of the Qur’an that there are 114 chapters in that sacred book. Out of these, six chapters are dedicated to 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.
Each of these chapters is particularly symbolic of the purpose to 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 quoted in this column last week is explicit 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….”
Honey is like a message. No one can gain access to a message 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 bees.
Bees are social insects living a communal life under an organised 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, an America apiarist, Lorenzo Lorrain Langstroth, discovered the principle of ‘bee space’ and designed a man-made hive that came to be named after him (Langstroth). According to his discovery, bees leave spaces of about 0.6 cm (about 0.23 inches) between wax combs. Thus, Langstroth’s discovery made it possible to remove individual frames from a beehive and to harvest honey and wax without destroying the colony. It also became possible to control diseases in the hive and to maintain a larger number of colonies. (A colony is a hive effectively occupied by bees while an apiary is a place where hives are sited and kept by an apiarist).
Man-made hives are of three types. These are Langstroth, Kenyan top bar and Tanzanian top bar. Kenyan and Tanzanian top bars are similar in shape and outlook. The one was designed in Kenya while the other was designed in Tanzania in the 1950s and 1962 early 1960s. Each of the Kenyan and Tanzanian hives can contain an average of 20 litres of honey. Langstroth on the other hand can contain as much as between 38 and 40 litres because of its double chamber capacity. 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 colonise the hive. Thus, it becomes a colony.
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 fertilised eggs shortly before those eggs are hatched and give them royal incubation. When they are hatched and become princesses, they are then fed with a special food called Royal Jelly to accelerate their growth and facilitate their longevity. After about 16 weeks, one of them is chosen and made the Queen while the rest are either taken out into new hives as Queens or left altogether to slug it out among themselves in a battle of survival. In such a situation, whichever of them emerges as overall winner retains the crown as the Queen of that particular hive. The other fertilised eggs not specially selected for the same purpose are left to grow naturally until they become worker bees.
Drones are the male bees produced from unfertilised eggs. They neither sting nor work. They are idle in the hive except for mating with an emerging queen which they do only once in a lifetime. As soon as they finish mating, 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 unfertilised eggs that produce them are scantily laid by the Queen. They constitute less than one per cent of the hive population. The other drones which do not participate in mating only loiter around the hive and feed freely from the labour of the workers. Their population is invariably determined by the Queen which lays very few big and unfertilised eggs from which the drones are produced. The worker bees are produced from smaller but fertilised eggs. 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) is left to reign.
By the natural culture of the bees, the Queen neither mates inside her own hive nor mated by the drones from the same hive. This is similar to the principle of endogamy (marriage within the same family) which is culturally prohibited in most African clans. 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 mate with the Queen. And the mating is done in the air.
To breed new bees, the Queen bee lays unfertilised eggs in the larger chambers of the bee comb while she lays fertilised 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 bees. Researchers in the field of apitherapy 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 those researchers to manufacture similar honeycomb as a means of assisting the bees in reducing their workload has proved abortive as the bees have shunned such artificial comb. Honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal cells built by the honeybees in their nest to contain their larvae and store honey and pollen.
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. 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 as a matter of duty. For carrying out such duties, they are called foragers.
Among the other multitude others remaining in or around the hive, some are responsible for guarding the hive against any foreign attack or aggression. They are the security officers. Some are assigned to carrying out the conversion to honey of the flower nectars brought into the hive by the foragers. Those are the corporate cooks in the hive. Some engage permanently in fanning the interior of the hive with their tiny wings to reduce the heat and neutralise the humidity therein. Those are the ventilators. Some specialise in converting to propolis the resin brought by the foragers. Those are the pharmacists or apothecaries. Some are assigned to the Queen’s kitchen as special cooks and prepare royal jelly for the Queen which is the latter’s exclusive food. Those are 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 the informants. Some are put in charge of nursing the young bees into adults. They are the foster mothers. Some are assigned to the building and maintenance of the honeycomb. Those are the colony architects and builders. Some are assigned to sterilising the interior of the hive with propolis and to ceiling 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 the sanitary inspectors. All of these duties are carried out by the female bees called worker bees.
In the performance of their duties, some foragers do alert others about the discovery of sources of raw materials like nectar and pollen 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 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. The Queen bee herself is about three times bigger in size than the worker bee. She 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.
When the Queen bee becomes old or weak and 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.
The drones (male bees) 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 for attack on an enemy. Stinging bees are like suicide bombers. They die in less than 30 minutes after they had stung. However, by virtue of her position and the special food she eats, the Queen can sting many times without any fear of death.
It must be noted that the bees work and 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 of 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 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.
Bees have as much friendly stinging as they have of 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.
The Queen bee mates with about six to eight drones, only once in a lifetime. And this is done over a period of two to seven days. And she must fly to at least a height of 20 metres in the air before mating. 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 Jackets 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 be neither crops nor farmers. No amount of narration here can expose all about the communal life of the bees. Their story is inexhaustible.
Identifying genuine honey
Following the publication of an article in this column last Friday entitled ‘The Prophet’s Medicine’, many readers of this column (not less than 401, as of last Tuesday when this piece was being put together), have called yours sincerely or sent messages wanting to know how genuine honey can be recognised. This column has no choice but to oblige since readers, like customers, are kings and queens.
A genuine honey can be recognized in two simple ways thus:
(1) By dropping a little quantity of honey in a transparent glass of water. It should ordinarily go straight to the bottom of the water and stay there without mixing with the water. If it mixes, consider it as either debased or not genuine.
(2) By dropping a little quantity of honey on a small portion of sand (not soil). It should ordinarily stay on top of such sand without sinking. If it sinks then it is not genuine. There are other ways by which genuine honey is tested. But those two ways should suffice for now. The idea that ants do not go near a genuine honey has no basis. Ants will go for anything sweet anywhere. The only reason why ants are careful about honey is its gummy nature. Ants have six legs. If they are not careful about their approach to honey they may get trapped in it. Thus, when the ants want to consume honey, they put only two legs forward and retain the other four backwards to enable escape getting trapped in gummy honey.
Besides, consummation of honey by human beings has rules and regulations. For instance honey should not be put in any hot substance like tea or pap. Such substance should be allowed to cool down to a warm level before honey can be added to it. Otherwise, one will merely be consuming the fructose in honey and not the vital properties like enzymes in it which are of high benefit to the body system.
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 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”. God bless the readers of ‘THE MESSAGE’.