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bee blindness

20.12.2019

An experienced beekeeper changes the queens in his hives every year: this is both a fight against swarming and caring for the strength of the bee colony: although the queen can live for five years, her fertility peaks in the second season. Someone buys queens, someone creates swarms, and someone uses the ability of bees to remove the fistulous queen from already laid eggs. The bees build special fistula cocoons above them, intensively feed the larvae with milk, and not a worker bee, but a queen emerges from the cocoon. First of all, she kills her rival sisters, settles in a hive, and after about a week soars into the sky to a kilometer height, pursued by a retinue of drones from all the surrounding apiaries. The strongest catches up with her, accomplishes the main work of his short life and dies. The uterus returns to the hive, where the bees extract a train from it - the genital organ that has come off the drone. This trail looks like the dead drone's last defense of its offspring, protection so that no one else will mate with the queen. But the uterus wants variety and again embarks on a mating flight.

As researchers from Denmark, Australia and the United States, led by Boris Baer from the Center for Integral Research on Bees at the University of California at Riverside, found out, she is in for a problem. It turns out that the dead drone had another, secret, weapon: the process of fertilization launched such changes in the body of the uterus that the very next day her vision deteriorated catastrophically. The result is sad: the uterus cannot recognize the native hive, confuses the entrances and, having got to the neighbors, finds a quick death there - there were a lot of such losers, a whole third.

In these experiments, however, there was one oddity. All beekeepers know that bees see poorly, and perceive ultraviolet light best of all. Therefore, it is recommended to add aluminum powder to the paint for beehives - it reflects light well in this region of the spectrum. However, it was precisely this area that was not studied - an ordinary LED served as a light source.

Nevertheless, even in this form, this study is very useful for beekeepers: they now understand that the queen is not lost out of stupidity, but because she began to see badly. Therefore, hanging on the hive all kinds of decorations made of shiny metals - figurines of flowers, bees, snowflakes and other things - is not at all a tribute to sentimentality, but the most practical way to ensure the safe return of the new queen to her bees.

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