I.1.CURIOSITIES OF BEES LIFE
"O you who knead of flowers
Gentle, fleeting perfume, a lasting flavor
Bees! your hive and saving art"
Prudhomme
* The bees have appeared before the people and accompanied them throughout their history. At first the bees were similar to larvae and fed with the leaves of ferns. When the flora diversified itself, the plants have started to flower and multiply themselves by pollination. It seems it was a mutual adaptation. The plants, for attracting the bees, gave them nectar, spices and attractive colors. The bees, for flying from flower to flower, were endowed with wings. And flying from flower to flower, through pollination, they helped the plants to multiply and bear fruit.
* The oldest apiarian document is a cave painting representing bees and dating from the Paleolithic, found in the Altamira cave, in Spain.
* Upon the entrance of the labyrinth of Minos, in the ancient Greece, there is an owl (symbol of death) and a swarm of bees (symbol of life).
* In the ancient Egypt it was said that the bees would be born from the tears of the god Ra (the sun god). Falling on the ground, the god tears would have turned into bees, and they gathered honey and wax of the flowers.
* The ancients believed that the bees are the perfection to all creatures of the world. In the "Georgics", admiring the perfection of the bee colony organization, Virgil said that the human life, too, should have as fundamental values the intelligence, order, work and virtues.
* The oldest attestation of the beekeeping on the territory of ancient Dacia, may be found out in the opera Histories, written by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (approx.. 484- approx. 425 BC), considered the father of history. Amazed by the crowd of bees of Dacia, he writes: "The lands beyond Ister are occupied by the bees and that is why the people can not go further".
* A queen (bees queen) can lay, within 24 hours, between 2000 and 3000 eggs; weighed, they are more than twice her body weight!
* To collect, by itself, 1 kg of honey a bee should investigate a number of 2-5 million flowers, travel a distance equal to the round of the earth and live 4400 days.
* The flight speed of a bee is about 70 km / h; loaded with pollen or nectar, the speed is reduced to 20 km / h
* A family of bees consists of 10000-80000 individuals: a queen, a few tens to a few hundred of drones, but the highest number is represented by the honey bees.
* Interesting is the reproduction in the bee colony and the genetic determinism of its members: queen, drones, honey bees. Their origin is one: the eggs laid out by the bees queen in the comb cells. The bee colony can exist only in the presence of the queen. The bees queen derives from the fertilized eggs laid out by another queen. The young queen, after hatching, shall remains in the hive for the first seven days of life, during which it eliminates its sisters, future candidates for the control of the kingdom. The latest hatch from other sources, but after the first "born" and if the bees do not prepare themselves for swarming, shall be killed. How in a pocket cannot fit two swords, nor the bees colony can have more than one queen. Meanwhile, left alone, the young queen matures itself in seven days. Now, it goes to what the beekeepers called "the mating flight". During this flight occurs the selection of the drones the queen will mate with. The queen, emitting sex pheromones that are designed to attract the drones, flyes at a high speed, reaching heights which, according to some authors, would reach even 2000 meters. The drones that lounge somewhere on flowers, waiting for passing any queens that they mate with, perceive the smell of the pheromones emitted by the queen and start to follow it. Their flight speed depends on the vigor of each of them. As their number is high - about 200, led by the most powerful of them, they take the shape of a flock. The queen mating is polyandric: it mates with multiple males at the same flight (usually seven to eight drones), occurring the phenomenon of hetero-spermia. When the first drone approaches to the queen, the last emits a pheromone that promotes the copulation. The mating with every drone takes between one and five seconds, until the spermateca of the queen, which has a volume of 1mm3, is filled. The last happy drone the queen mated with is the most unfortunate drone, too. The queen vagina closes and the drones genitals are pulled out together with its intestines. Now, this queen - unless it happens to be caught and eaten by a bird in flight - returns to the hive. It carries with it the visible sign of mating - the genitals of the last drone it mated with - but also a biological endowment consisting of fertilized spermatozoons. They will ensure the fertilization of the queen eggs, from which will hatch bees and queens for a period of 4-7 years. After two or three days, during which the ovaries of the queen develop a lot, starts the clock of eggs laying, which in the months with abundant harvest in nectar and pollen, can reach 2000-3000 eggs per day.
* The reproductive apparatus of the bee queen has amazing similarities with the women one. The same can be said about the endocrine-hormonal system that governs the reproduction, and the growth of the bee brood and of the child. On the knowledge of these similarities, including the hormonal involvement level, rely the successes we got in the field of the human reproduction, employing honey bee therapeutic products the biochemical, hormonal in particular structure of which is based on the comparative study of reproduction in the two families: the people and the bees. Of course, in addition to the substances that restore the human reproductive health, the honey bee therapeutic products contain prohormone and hormone identical to the human ones, definitely superior of the biocompatible / functional point of view to those obtained by pharmochemical synthesis.
- The bee queen reproductive appararus consists of the vagina, spermateca (where are stored the sperms obtained from the mating flight), two ovaries, two ovarian tubes - tubes with a somewhat similar role with the one of the women ovarian tubes - who come together in a tube (oviduct) , where pass the ovules (the eggs). While passing along the spermateca, the hole of the last opens and releases 4-5 sperm per egg, from which only one fertilizes the egg while in transit. Only the eggs from which are going to be born the bees are fertilized (they are laid in the smallest cells of the honeycomb - having a diameter of 5.4 mm and are 12 mm high) but also o the bee queens (in this case, the cells have the diameter of 10-21 mm and are 20-25 mm in height). Both the queen ovule and the drone sperm have each of them 16 chromosomes, so that the resulted individuals - bees and queens, have each of them 32 chromosomes. If the bees guide the queen to lay eggs in the cells designed for growing the drones (they have the diameter of 6.5 mm and a height of 11-12 mm), the spermateca does not open itself, so that the eggs the drones will be formed from are not fertilized.
- The neurosecretory cells of the bees are located in the brain. They – playing a role similar to that of the human hypothalamus - secrete hormones having a signal role, which activates the endocrine glands of the bees, also having functions including gonadotropins, stimulating the activation of the queen ovaries. The hormones circulate through the haemolymph (the bees blood). For the functions of their own reproductive apparatus the bees have estrogen, progesterone etc., but also differentiated somathormons that regulate the body differentiated growth.
* The food that the nurse bees use for growing the bee brood are common in the first three days, in the egg stage, from which will be formed the three future castes of the family: queen, bees and drones. The Royal Jelly is produced by the hypopharyngeal glands of the nurse bees. After that, the eggs go to the stage of larvae and the food will be differentiated. With royal jelly continue to be fed only the future queens, while the future bees and drones will receive a different food in the structure of which enters the honey, pollen and water. This food has a different, androgenisant hormonal load, but also somathormons controlling the physical size of each caste.
* Depending on the fertilization or unfertilization of the eggs, depending on the various sizes of the cells where they grow, the feed received during the growth, containing a definite hormonal differentiation, shall be decided the sex and the functions in the bee colony, as well as the duration of the development from the egg to the hatch: for queens - 16 days, for bees - 21 days and for drones - 24 days.
* In the harvesting season if the eggs laying clock reaches 2000-3000 eggs per day, for their fertilization shall be daily used 12-15 000 sperms.
* Fed only with royal jelly, the bee queen (the queen) reaches maturity 5 days sooner than the bee and lives approx. 70 times more.
* A bee queen can live 5-7 years, but the abundant eggs laying to ensure a strong, large family, last only two to three years. When the eggs laying clock of the queen is reduced and the family falls numerically, the beekeepers suppress it and grow another queen which replace the unprofitable one.
* Like the queen, the bees are females. Their reproductive apparatus is identical to that of the queen. This, however, is developed rudimentary: first, because of the small size of cells, much lower than the ones where grows the queen, but also thanks to the reduction of the amount of somathormons they receive during the growth. Moreover, although they are females, the bees are "castrated" especially through the agency of the food they receive. The bee nutrition during the development from the larva to the nymph is androgenized, similar to that received by the drones under growing course – the males that are designed to pair the queen. This eating atrophies in particular the ovarian function of the bees. It is, one might say, a reference to the menopause, such like the women treated for endometriosis, whose menses are interrupted through hormonotherapy for about four months. The structure of this eating, as the estradiol-aromatase-progesterone ratio has been the base of the honey bee therapeutic products with which we treat the unfertilisant endometriosis. As it is treated classically, the endometriosis is recurrent. By apitherapy, the women do not have to be submitted to any laparoscopy (only for diagnostic purpose) or chemotherapy-induced menopause or ovarian stimulation which, if their goal is not achieved, shall androgenize - sometimes irreparably.
* However, sometimes, the bees, although they do not mate, lay eggs in the hive which became giddy. It happens in some cases that a bee colony remain without queen, but also without the eggs from which they can grow a new sovereign, mother and source of perpetuation of the colony. The bee colony however, will remain a model for survival and propagation. Some bees, in a way unexplained so far, develop the ovarian function, produce and lay eggs in the cells of the combs. As they are not fertilized, from these eggs grow only drones. Such a family, say the beekeepers, was made giddy. To this colony they cannot give a queen, since it would be killed by the bees which lay eggs. It seems they take over the instinct of sovereignity of the queens. Saving such families should be possible only by bringing the hive to a few hundred meters away from its location, where all the bees should be shaken off from the frames. Then the beehive should be put back on the old place. All the bees return to the hive, except the ones who laid eggs, which, because they have not flown before, forget the emplacement of their “house”. They come in other families where, as they are foreign (they don’t have the characteristic odor of the queens of the hives where they want to enter), they shall be killed. Only now can the beekeeper resume the operations to replace the queen in the orphan hive.
* The colony of bees is a kingdom, but with major republican events. The bees, depending on the richness of honey and pollen, decide the amount of eggs and in which cells namely must be laid these eggs. When the food supplies are low, the bees do not build cells for growing the queens and the eggs laying in the cells designed for growing the drones shall be reduced to being banned altogether. If the bees family is strong and rich, the bees prepare themselves for swarming in order to set up new families. To this end in view they increase the number of the drones to several hundreds and build a large number of cells for the future queens. The bees decide the moment of swarming and a number of them leave with the old queen. Usually, the old queen remains in the hive until its successor shall mate itself, but can be instances when it leaves even before. If the bees plan the departure of more swarms, they will prohibit to the first born of the future queens to eliminate the other ones, which may end up being in number of tens.
* The swarm of bees, made up of the queen and of about 10 000 bees, usually go around at 10-11 o’clock AM, but only after the bees fill their crop with honey - food reserve until they install in the "new house" and resume the harvest. Typically, the swarm sits on the branch of a tree near the apiary, but only for a few hours. Meanwhile, a number of bees of the swarm are scouting in search of new homes, which can be a hollow of a tree, a chimney of a house, a hollow in a rock, an empty hive near the apiary etc. If, meanwhile, the beekeeper did not take the bees swarm out from the branch on which he sat, it goes into the new shelter.
* Once, the bees could live "in the wild" without being cared for by humans. But from a century, the number of families of its kind depleted gradually to extinction. Due to the lice infestation, that previously did not exist, the swarms of bees have no chance of survival away from man. For the survival of their hives, the beekeepers delouse them by certain treatments applied several times a year. The bee swarms which have left the hive "by itself" can often survive until fall, but only in very rare cases they may live until the next spring or summer. They are killed by the lice multiplication. Among the lice, the most significant impact on the bee colonies and honey production, have the ones called the Varroa destructor (Varroa Jacobsoni) or mites. The colonies infestation with these lice is commonly called acariosis. Round, almost like a flying saucer with a flat body, supported by many feet, these lice can be an example of adaptation in nature. The female laies eggs in the cells with bee eggs and when it hatches, it already bears some lice, being already parasited. These lice feed on the blood (haemolymph) of the bees. Another louse, Braula coeca, very small, eats royal jelly: either it sit so that it can be taken while the bees transmit the royal jelly to the queen, or it tickle the queen so that the last regurgitates some of the royal jelly it was fed with.
* The queen never eats itself alone, but it is fed by the nurse bees, which also produce the royal jelly.
* The bee families who lived until the early twentieth century, particularly in the forests, were so numerous, that could give rise to an occupation whose memory is preserved in the names of families or communities. It is so called “bârcuire” and “bârcuitori”. The “bârcuitori”, using the help of smoke, took the honeycombs filled with honey from the "wild" bees families. Were harvested large quantities of honey and at once a part of honey and beeswax reached the markets, the occupation continuing to be practiced even after the development of the beekeeping, near the households. Bârca, Bârcan, Bârcaciu, Bârcănești – these are names of villages and people, living near the forests, heaven of the swarms of bees, citing an occupation extincted nowadays. And of course, taking into account how the people assault the nature nowadays, it will never be possible. Even more, the bees of the apiaries cared by men, face chemical ever increasing dangers.
* Usually the “bârcuitori” knew beforehand the trees in whose hollows were the bee colonies whose honey they were going to harvest. But they also had on hand a simple method by which they could find them. They placed a comb or a little honey in a jar somewhere in a meadow. Soon arose a bee, then more, filling their crops with honey. The “bârcuitor” watched the flight direction of these bees into the tree they went carrying the honey, finding this way the searched hollow.
* A worker bee, in the harvest season, live 40-44 days; the "wintering" bee lives about six months, during which the growth of the bee brood shall be gradually reduced until the termination (in October-November) and then it will be resumed (January-February).
* The duties of the bees in the colony are genetically programmed, each group of bees having specific tasks: bees foraging for nectar, bees foraging for pollen, bee foraging for propolis, water bringer bees (they bring water in the hives), sanitary bees (they care for the cleanliness and health in the hive), military bees - hive guard - who are usually sitted on the flight board and keep the entry (the bee entrance). Sometimes, depending on the emergency, each of these groups of bees can be temporarily moved to other tasks, but each time they returned to the duties for which they were programmed. The harmony, diligence, dedication and perfect organization of the colony, which can be a model for the human society, made possible to cross the millennia during which many other species disappeared. Anyone who knows the colony of bees, come to understand that for every bee in part, what matters is not his own life but the life of the colony. For its prosperity and multiplying since the bee "is born" and until death, it work without a moment of resting. For the bee there is no "I"! There is only "us"! Never a bee will hesitate, not even for a split of second, to give its lives in defense of the homeland: his hive and his family.
* When the bee stings, it does it only to protect and defend his threatened family. After puncture, the bee dies. It cannot remove the needle, which remains in the skin punctured together with the venom bag
* Sovereign, the queen is always accompanied by a number of bees. The last, in the everyday speech of the beekeepers, are called the guard of the queen. They defend the queen, feed it, direct it to the cells where it has to lay eggs, they caress it on the abdomen and spread throughout in the hive a pheromone called the queen substance (scent of bee queen). This pheromone is a scent different from that of other queens. Depending on this, the bees also know if theirs sistersd were placed on a particular flower, but they are also recognized by the bees of the guard of the hive when they return from the field, thus allowing their entry only.
* The bees of a family are true sisters only by mother (queen). The sperms of the drones that queen mated with do not mix each other. That is why the bees of a family are paternal half-sisters.
* The drones, the males of the colony, have not fathers, but only mothers, which are the queens. When the queen is going to lay eggs in a cell of the size needed to grow drones, the spermateca does not open itself and the eggs are not fertilized.
* The eggs from which are going to be formed the future queens and the future bees are identical, in both cases they are fertilized. What differentiates them during the development toward adult is the different size of the cells, as well as the food they receive. The future queens receive food that stimulates ovulation and eggs laying, but which also has a more pronounced load of somathormons: the dimensions of the queen are larger (the queen is 18-25 mm long and weighs 150-280 mg); the bees receive an androgenisant food and because they are smaller (12-13 mm in length and an average of weight of 10 mg), they receive a much reduced amount of somathormons.
* Flying, the bee wings run 440 beats / minute! A clip: a second!
* The bee gathers the pollen of flowers by tongue, moistening it with its own secretion and joining it in small grains in the little baskets located on its rear legs. The speed the bee runs from head to the rear legs is so high that it cannot be seen with the naked eye.
* In a year, a family of bees, for his own existence, consume 100 kg of honey, 50 kg pollen and 50 liters of water (brought in the hive by the water bringer bees).
* Coming from harvesting, in order to maintain the energy required to flight a bee consumes from the nectar collected from flowers, 0.5 mg per km of flight. Therefore, the greater the distance to the melliferous plants, the less amount of nectar the bees bring to the hive.
* The light radius of the bee around the hive is more than 6 km, but the cost recovery of the harvests can only be made at distances of less than 3 km (they consume a lot for the energy needed for the return flight).
* The bees "talk": coming from the field, they make with the underchest part (the abdomen) certain movements, called "the bee dance". Through these movements they communicate to the sisters of the hive a new source of nectar, its direction, distance to it, its abundance, etc. The German Karl von Frisch, who deciphered the "dance" received the Nobel Prize.
* To bring 100 g of water in the hive, a bee must make 3,000 flights.
* The bee larvae are "visited" by the nurse bees who feed them, about 10,000 times in 6 days.
* A bee is 20 times stronger than a horse: it can move on a flat surface a weight weighing 20 times its own weight; a horse only pulls its own weight. A bee can fly wearing another bee (so it flies carrying a weight equal to its own).
* 10,000 bees weigh 1 kg. Calculate!
* When swarming to set up a new family, the bees leave with the crop full of honey: 10,000 bees can carry 400 grams of honey, but cannot stick any more, since they cannot bend the abdomen with the full crop.
* Pollinating the crops and plantations, the bees bring, indirectly, an income by far higher than the value of the hive products. There are frequent cases where the farmers, in order to achieve higher yields, pay the beekeepers to bring the hives in their cultures.
* The mouse looks for proteins in the hive: it does not eat honey, it eats pollen and bees it detaches from the winter ball. The bees cannot leave the wintering ball to annihilate the mouse. They would die frozen. The coming of warmer days mean for the mouse a great trouble: stung by many bees, it shakes its whole body under the impact of venom, then it passes away. Because it is too large to be carried out of the hive, the bees wear it in wax and propolis to keep the hive clean. Usually the mice enter the hive through the bee entrance in the cold days of late autumn and early winter. Sometimes they prepare their own end: greedy, they eat more, grow and get fat, so when they leave the hive, the bee entrance is not fitted for them. Or they are surprised by the beekeeper or are killed by the bees.
* The drones, a very experienced character, can not be charged as unworthy: its tube is too short to reach the nectar of flowers. Therefore, it feeds only on nectar brought by the bees. It is the most convenient way, right? However, it flies: to sleep in the sun on a flower, hence, occasionally, it looks now and then into the sky, maybe, maybe will pass any queen it mates with. Great rake! But if you do not work, you can be filled with lust! It has a keen eye which is worth to be envied! And the smell, by the aid of which it perceives the pheromones spread away by the queen from the mating flight, competes even its eyesight.
* The bee, like the bee queen, too, has three simple eyes and two compound eyes, the last being composed, each o them, of 5000 many simple eyes. The drone has three simple eyes and two compound eyes, each composed of 8000 simple eyes. The bee brushes its eye facets by the hairs of its front legs; the same way it cleans its antennae, too.
* The bee antennas are tactile and olfactory organs, which are composed of 15,000 fossae with sensory nerve cells.
* Throughout her life of picker, a bee can collect about 10 g of honey.
* A bee larva, first weighing less than 1 mg, consume in six days 200 mg of food.
* The queen lays eggs, but their feeding and the feeding of larvae into that turn the eggs is made by the nurse bees that produce the necessary royal.
* The nurse bees are the young bees that have not yet flown. They remain in the hive for the first 21 days of life. When flying for the first time, they perform a kind of dance in flight in front of the hive, then around him, during which they store its color, location, location of the bee entrance, any other indications that might serve as guidance when returning from the field: trees, buildings, other local details.
* A bee will never enter another hive. In fact, the bees of the hive guard, perceiving a foreign smell, will chase away and sometimes will kill it if it insists to come. However, there are two situation when the bee can enter another hive. If the bee returns from the field burdened with nectar, it can enter a hive of a foreign apiary, positioned between the melliferous flora (place of the harvest) and its own apiary. Especially while harvesting the acacia and sunflower the beekeepers take care that between their apiary and acacia forest or sunflower chain not be located other apiaries, or they would have great losses in the production of honey. The bees can also loot. Especially at the end of the harvest season, and also when the beekeeper keeps too much open a hive or place syrup or honey on the external walls of the hive. Then begins what the beekeeper call pilferage, especially if the contested family is weaker. The bees from other hives begin to enter the robbed hive. Initially, a number of bees are killed in the battle that takes place in the hive with the contested bees. Sometimes even the queen is killed. When the colony is defeated its own bees begin to help the invasive honey bees in transporting the honey and bee bread to the hive of the assaulting bees.
* The colony of bees, as long as they perceive the queen substance (the pheromone, smell of queen), work quietly. If that smell that people can not perceive is absent, the bees become restless and start to build special cells for producing a new queen. If there are not special cells for the queen, the bees increase some cells in which there are eggs that were going to be turned into bees. They turn them into special cells for the queen and raise a new sovereign for which they also change food that is given. Thus, the bees change its destiny. If the egg has not yet become larva, then the future sovereign will be a quality queen. That means a fertile one. If the bees "take in working" a cell where there is a larva of a future bee, the more days it has surpassed the egg stage, the more features of the received food printer will keep the future sovereign as a next bee. The body size will be smaller, the daily eggs laying clock will be greatly reduced, the family will decline.
* A bee born into a powerful family lives more than one born into a poor family (ie the force depends on the quality of the nurse bees, those that secrete the royal jelly).
* There is a race of bees which is monochrome: the queen and the bees can give birth under virgin condition to other bees (gynogenesis); the ordinary honey bees under virgin condition, as we have seen, give rise to drones (androgenesis).
* There are bees without needle: they defend themselves by rushing in a large number on the possible enemy which they intimidate with their large number and intensely, powerful buzzing.
* On each flight, a bee which collects pollen forage 0.15 mg of pollen (if clover, it must investigate 600 flowers to collect this amount).
* The bees only sting if they feel their life threatened.
* A horse simultaneously stung by 9 bees, shall die.
* If a bee got lost itself and a man passes through the site, either it flies around him or sit on his clothes and accompanies him until reaching home.
* Instinct or genetic memory: when the beekeeper smoked the hive, the bees should not sting any more; frightened, they rush to fill their crops with honey. It seems that this gesture is communicated genetically: when they lived in the trees hollows and the forests were burned by lightning, they quickly filled with honey their crops, to flee from the path of the fire and to seek a new shelter.
* The work in a bee colony is conducted in full accord and in an effort, which, in the 40-44 days, as long as the bees live in the harvesting season is not interrupted even for a second. An impressive effort, without a moment of rest.
* Never a bee dies in the family for which he toiled without a drop of rest, from the moment of hatching from the cell. When they feel the end (compare with the elephant !), they fly away from the hive and fall somewhere among the herbs, flowers and groves, where they die lonely, unknown, unseen by anyone. It is the last act that they can do for the bee colony that gave them life, with the gratitude that they left it large, strong, prosperous. Faithful soldier of his people, the bee death, of a tragic, anonymous grandeur, seems to me to equal by nobility the sublime sacrifice of the Spartan soldiers fell under the swords of the Persians at Salamis: with language of death they ask to the passenger to say to Sparta (their colony) that they fell defending its laws and freedom. Do not compare such noble deeds with those of the ones who cut with chainsaw the forests of the mountains or drowns them into cyanide, as at Rosia Montana, disturbing Daco-Roman and Orthodox cemeteries. The first are the fame, the latter are the shame of any nation.
* And if still rarely the bee dies in the hive, another bee of the sanitary troops makes the effort, raises it in the air and fly away, away somewhere, leaving it to fall among the flowers from which it harvested the nectar and pollen.
* The bees are somewhat similar in terms of the drones with the stories about the Amazons. In the autumn, when the harvest of nectar begins to be so low that the bees understand that swarming is not possible any longer, so another queen has not to be fertilized, the fate of the drones shall be decided by the Amazons of the hive. In the evening, when the drones return from the field, where they slept on a flower, waiting to see the flight of any queen with they might mate, the military body of the hive guard, placed in the bee entrance, prohibit their entry. If a rattler succeed to pass the guard standing in the bee entrance, it will be soon seen and driven out through the united efforts of two bees, each pulling one of its wings: it is a show that deserves to be seen. Those who succeed in entering, each autumn day less, are driven into a corner of the hive and are not allowed to reach the honeycombs filled with honey. And so it goes, that the hive remains to enter the winter only with the queen and the bees, with the drones passing away in the cold winter nights. What do you want? So many mouths of drones are hard to feed in winter, and such an individual which became redundant for now, eats as much honey every day as can be brought in the hive by five pickers in one day. And think that they have an entire summer for lounging ! In the spring, however, when the combs are starting to be filled with honey, the bees will grow other drones: they want to multiply themselves, to swarm and the future young queen must be paired.
* The ball of winter - an example of citizen solidarity! The hive is the city, the country of the bees and they are citizens. The inhabitants of the city. Towards the end of the autumn, when the nights are becoming colder, the bees place themselves on the honeycombs, forming what the beekeepers call the wintering ball. The ball is round, like a ball. Depending on the number of the bees entering the winter, the ball includes more or fewer frames with combs in which there is honey and bee bread. This setting is designed to keep the heat inside the balls, in its center, carefully protected, being the queen. Now, the last do not lies eggs any more and the drones, big consumers of honey, had already been expelled from the middle of the autumn.
In winter, no matter as well the hive would be thermally protected, the only warm place is in the center of the ball. The temperature in the hive, around the ball, is quite close to the outside. Any bee emerging from the ball, freezes and dies. Some of the bees, those that are in contact with the combs, after eating to maintain their temperature, move to the edge of the ball, replacing those which are hungry and on the verge of freezing. The last ones cross the ball to the honey of the combs where they restore their powers. The bee colony acts as a body. Here, as I said, there is not "I", there is only "us". The citizen solidarity, the common good subordinating any action is amazing in the bee colony. Sometimes one has seen an ox stinging another one, taking its hay, even if its own hay was larger. However, those people in the Romanian Trojan horse, are not bees. They rob a nation, their hay haystack is growing. The spirit, culture, virtues, altruism, beauty and bees will cross the ages. The hay eaters, no.