Garry Martin, age 10, of Cape Elizabeth, Me
Does an under ground bee nest have two entrances?
There is so much to learn about the fascinating ways of the honeybee that we tend to think that she is the only bee in the world. But she has at least 10,000 cousins, and each type of bee has her own particular way of life. There are other social bees that live together in colonies, though their nests are not as well run as the hive of the honeybee. There are also solitary bees who live alone. Each solitary bee is a queen who builds her nests, gathers food, feeds and brings up her children without the help of a staff of worker bees.
The honeybees build their teeming hive in a hollow tree or in asuitable home provided by a beekeeper. In the trees of the tropics there are wild stingless beesp some no bigger than mosquitoes. In North America we have at least 50 different bumblebees. We have leaf‑cutter bees, miner bees, mason bees, carpenter bees and even cuckoo bees. All these fuzzy little buzzers gather pollen and nectar from the flowers, but each type of bee has her own ideas about housekeeping and child care.
The rests of countless wild bees are hidden in the fields and forests, in the prairies and even the deserts. In these secret nurseries, the young bees develop from milky white eggs to hungry grubs, then sleep a while in their silken cocoons and finally hatch into winged adults. The nursery of the mason bee is made from muddy cement. The cradle of the carpenter bee is a tunnel in a twig or log.
The miner bee and the many bumblebees often build their nests in the ground, The miner is a solitary bee, though often hundreds of her sisters will build their tunnels nearby, making a kind of bee village. Each tunnel has but one entrance in the roof, though several rooms may branch off from the main corridor.
The many different bumblebees are social insects living in colonies of 50 to several thousand. Each nest is new every year, for only the young queen survives the winter. She hunts for a ready‑made vacant apartment, maybe a hole made by a mouse or a burrow made by a gopher. The old home may have two entrances, but the queen bumblebee uses only one of them. She builds a nest of scraps gathered from nearby plants, stores it with food and lays her first batch of eggs. The cozy nest has only one entrance and just inside the front door, the queen bumblebee builds a waxy jar to hold a supply of honey.
Soon the ground nest of the bumblebee teems with busy workers coming and going through the little front door. But it is only their workshop, for they do not live there as the honeybees live in their hive. In the fall, a few new queens are hatched and a few drones who will become their husbands, The drones and all the workers will perish with the first cold spell. The queens will hide from the cold and wait to start new bumblebee nests in the spring.