Friday, February 23, 2007

Bee Scandal, Literally!

Gigi saw this shameless insects mating on a banana leaf. And we shameless humans took photos of their "deed" (for educational purposes, hehehe)..


I noticed that the female bee is bigger. Weng asked how I knew which is the female bee. The one whose being ridden of course, haha. No brainer.

These pics are really educational; I read about queen bees today.

I learned that a queen bee's function is just to lay eggs, in other words, her vagina is an "egg factory", hehehe. During reproduction season, she will go out from the colony on a warm, sunny day to mate with 12 - 15 drones (the bitch!). She will only have a limited time to mate, and if she is unable to fly because of bad weather and remains unmated, she will become a "drone layer", meaning she will only produce male bees for life, thus, death for the colony. (Yup, they can't live without us women). A healthy queen bee can lay about 2,000 eggs per day and all her needs will be tended by her slaves, like giving her food and cleaning up her poopoos and weewees. And the young workers also lick her body "pheromones". This pheromones is eaten by the worker bees so that they can't lay eggs of their own. (Yeah, they don't a need coup d'etat or maybe the queen is just selfish. Imagine, 12 - 15 drones???...hmmm).

Cheers!

2 comments:

Brennan said...

what camera did you use for this nice macro shot? :)

Unknown said...

hi brennan.. I have an Olympus IR-300 camera. you can view the info here:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0502/05021708oly_ir300.asp

You can also view my write-up about my macro photography here:
http://gilohk.blogspot.com/2007/02/attempt-at-macro-photography.html

Hehehe..