If you listen to a hive of bees, what you’ll hear is a droning, humming buzz. Sometimes it gets so loud that you might wonder how the bees hear each other at all. Well, the truth is: they don’t. Bees don’t need to hear each other, because they don’t talk to each other using sounds. Bees talk to each other by making smells, and by dancing!

In school science, you might learn that a hive contains a queen bee and thousands of worker bees. The big queen is surrounded by her “court” of about twelve bees. The queen’s court feeds her and cleans her, but if you look closely, you can also see them brushing their antennae against the queen’s body over and over again. They’re doing this because a queen produces something called pheromones, which are smelly chemicals, and different pheromones tell the bees in the hive to do different things. A worker bee in the queen’s court picks up the pheromones from the queen, and then uses her antennae to spread that smell around the hive.

Soldier bees make some important smells, too. Soldiers are older worker bees who guard the entrance to the hive from any insects or other animals who might threaten the hive or the babies inside. If a soldier senses danger, she releases a “warning” pheromone that tells all the other bees to come help with their stingers ready. School science teaches us to leave bees alone, and with good reason; if you swat at a bee and she releases that warning smell, you might have a whole hive of angry bees to deal with instead!

Even dead bees can communicate with the hive. When a bee dies, she releases a “dead bee” pheromone. This is important because a hive is crammed full of thousands of bees, and they have to keep it tidy and clean so that the bees in the hive don’t get sick. So as soon as a worker picks up that “dead bee” smell on her antennae, the smell guides her to the bee so she can pick it up in her jaws and carry it out of the hive.

But smells aren’t the only ways bees talk to each other; they also like to dance!

Bees need lots of nectar and pollen, so when a bee finds some, she needs to tell the other bees where to find it. She does this using something called the “waggle dance”. She stands facing in one direction and waggles her abdomen back and forth; each waggle represents a certain distance. Then she turns in a figure-eight and waggles again. She repeats this dance over and over, and the other workers watch her carefully. What’s she’s doing is giving them a complicated set of directions: she’s saying “when you leave the hive, turn this way and go this far, then you turn this way and go this far.”

But although the waggle dance is the most famous, there are many other dances that bees use to talk to each other. The “round dance” is a circular dance that says “hey, there’s food near the hive!”, a “vibrating dance” that tell lazy workers “hey, get up and do something!”, and even a shaky, staggering dance tells other bees “somebody please clean me!”

Bee talk is some real science fun. Imagine if you had to get your ideas across using only smells and dances. People might start to avoid you if you got really smelly, but what kind of dances would you do do to say “I’m hungry,” or “I don’t want to go to bed right now.” Maybe the next time you have trouble thinking of the right thing to say, you should just make like a bee and dance it out instead!

Post by Sarah

Hey kids, if you held a contest to find the strongest animal in the world, who do you think the winner would be? Would it be an elephant? Or maybe a giant squid? If we made all the animals the same size to make it a fair contest, the winner is an animal that can lift 850 times its own weight. Imagine carrying around 850 of your friends!

Have you guessed it yet? The strongest animal in the world… is a beetle!

Beetles are incredible insects. There are more species of beetle than any other group of living things. In fact, one quarter of all known forms of life on Earth are beetles!

Beetles all share the same basic shape: they have a hard exoskeleton, a body with six legs, and two pairs of wings. The front pair is hard, like a shell, and makes a protective cover over the delicate inner wings.

We can usually tell beetles apart by this hard wing cover. For example, one of the most famous beetles, the ladybird or ladybug, has a red wing cover with black spots. Some wing covers can be extremely beautiful, in glittering metallic colours that make the beetle look like a little jewel. A fun fact about beetles is that they shed this hard outer shell as they grow, and you can find empty shells attached to trees and the undersides of leaves if you look carefully.

The strongest beetle is the rhinocerous beetle, which gets its name from the giant horn at the front of its head. The rhinoceros beetle is actually the strongest animal in the world – it’s the only one capable of lifting 850 times their own weight. Even ants, which are famous for their strength, can only lift 50 times their weight.

One of the scariest looking beetles is the stag beetle. Its jaws are so big that they look just like the antlers on a deer! They eat leaves and bark, but they can also deliver a powerful bite if you try to bother them, so it’s best to leave them alone.

Some beetles even like to swim. Whirlygig beetles swim around on the surface of the water, and spin in circles if they’re frightened. One fun fact about whirlygigs is that if they need to dive underwater, they take a bubble of air with them so that they can stay under!

Some cultures even see beetles as sacred. Scarab beetles are one kind of sacred beetle. Another name for scarab beetles is dung beetles, because they roll up a ball of dung, move it to a protected place, lay their eggs in the dung, and when the eggs hatch, the beetle larvae eat the dung! They live in Egypt where the desert meets the farmland, and this is also the place where Egyptian burials take place. Because of this, and the baby beetles’ habit of popping unexpectedly out of a ball of dung, they came to represent eternal life to the ancient Egyptians. There is even an ancient Egyptian story that says the sun is rolled across the sky by a giant scarab god!

So next time you spot a beetle when you’re out for a walk, stop a moment to give it your respects. After all, beetles can lift more than any other animal, turn into submarines, and roll the sun across the sky: that deserves a round of applause!

Post by Sarah

Hey kids, do you have any brothers and sisters? Imagine living in a house crammed wall-to-wall with thousands of your sisters, and you have a bit of an idea of what it’s like to be a honey bee. A working bee hive in the summer can be filled with thousands of bees, and if you look closely (with the help of a trained beekeeper, of course!), you might discover three different kinds of bees – it’s discoveries like these that make science fun!

The only male bees in the hive are called drones; they’re big and fat, they can’t sting, and have to be fed, cleaned, and cared for by their sisters. There are only a few of them in the hive, and their only job is to mate with new queens. That may sound like a nice, easy life, but in the winter, their sisters kick them out of the hive to freeze. Ouch!

There are two kinds of female bees. The biggest bee in the hive is the queen, and there’s only one. She’s big because her body is filled with eggs; the queen is the mother of the hive. On a busy summer day, one queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs.

Most of the bees in the hive are worker bees. Worker bees are all females without eggs, and they take care of all the work that needs to be done.

A worker bee’s life begins as a tiny egg. The egg hatches into a white larva, like a small worm or caterpillar, and for the next seven days or so, all that bee larvae does is grow and eat. Once it grows big enough to fill its cell in the honeycomb, an adult worker builds a cap of wax over the opening to the baby bee’s cell, and that little larvae turns itself into a pupa. A pupa is a little bit like the coccoon of a moth, and inside that pupa, that baby bee is changing from a shapeless white blob into a grown-up bee, with legs, wings, antennae, and a stinger. One good thing about learning science online is you don’t have to risk a nasty sting!

When the change is finished, the new bee chews its way out and gets to work. The youngest bees start their lives cleaning up the hive, licking the cells clean with their tongues and carrying out bits of debris with their strong jaws.

Older bees have the job of nursing the baby larvae, bringing them the food they need to grow strong. Sometimes nurses have the job of feeding special larvae full of a substance called royal jelly. This will make the larvae turn into queens instead of a workers. To make sure they get a good strong queen, the workers will feed several larvae with royal jelly, and the new queens will fight to the death when they hatch! The queen who lives takes over the hive.

After they grow out of nursing, older bees will move to the entrance of the hive and become soldiers, guarding the hive from any invading insects that might eat the larvae, and stinging anything that tries to attack the hive. They will only sting if they have a good reason, though – once a honeybee stings, she dies.

The oldest bees are the foragers. Their job is to travel away from the hive to bring back nectar and pollen to turn into honey. It’s an important job, but it’s also a dangerous one – in the summer, an adult bee lives about two weeks.

It may be a difficult life, but the end result is a hive full of golden, sticky honey. It’s food for the bees in the hive, and it’s also a tasty treat for us! Now that’s a sweet idea.

Post by Sarah

Some people think of mummies as scary monsters, but kids science knows better. A mummy is actually any body that has been dried out; this can happen in ice, in acid bogs, and in the desert. By using science to study these ancient bodies, we can learn the stories of people who lived thousands of years ago!

One day in late spring in the Italian Alps, a man and some of his friends got into a fight and the man was shot with an arrow. He was quickly covered by snow and ice, where he remained frozen for 5,300 years! Because he had been frozen so quickly, his body was preserved until the ice thawed, and this ice mummy (nicknamed Ötzi) became famous around the world.

Ötzi’s body tells the story of last days. His skeleton shows that he walked all over hills and mountains, and was probably a shepherd. He was also a very important man – the kind of axe he carried was only owned by powerful families. Scientists even managed to look inside his stomach to discover that his last meal was bread, deer meat, roots, and berries – yum!

Over two thousand years later, and half a world away, a fourteen year old boy named Nakht lived with his family in Egypt. His family were poor weavers, but after Nakht died, they used their savings to buy a beautiful coffin for him that they placed in a temple in the desert.

The ancient Egyptians were experts at preserving their dead. To mummify a body, they would remove all the organs (all those wet squishy things go bad quickly and smell bad) and cover the body with a salty substance called natron that would dry it out. Forty days later, they wrapped the body in bandages and placed it in a tomb. The body looked nice, but all the things that would tell future scientists about how these people lived were destroyed.

Fortunately for us, Nakht’s family was too poor to have him mummified. Instead, he was placed in the desert, which was so hot that it dried out his body and perfectly preserved him for 3,200 years. When he was rediscovered, scientists were able to learn many incredible things about him.

Nakht had a very hard life – he had lines on his bones that somebody gets when they are sick a lot as a kid and don’t grow. We do know that he got beef and pork to eat, because his body was full of parasites you can only get when these meats aren’t cooked properly.

Nakht’s coffin tells us that he was an expert weaver, and would probably have started work when he was seven, but his lungs tell us another story; that he might also have been a bit of a troublemaker! His lungs were full of red granite dust, which isn’t found anywhere near the town where he lived. Scientists believe that the only way this dust could have gotten there is if he’d gotten in trouble with the law, and been sentenced to polish granite statues in the temple as punishment!

But whatever he did, we know his family loved him, because they bought him the beautiful coffin that preserved him so well and gave us this amazing look at what life was like for an ordinary boy who lived over three thousand years ago.

Maybe someday, thousands of years from now, scientists might want to know how you lived, too!

Post by Sarah