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, 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

Have you ever pricked your finger and looked at the drop of blood that forms? In that one tiny drop of blood, there are thousands of living cells, and some of those cells are locked in a fight to the death!

Our bodies are made up of trillions of tiny living building blocks called cells. A cell is so tiny that you can only see one using a microscope. We have over 200 different kinds of cells in our bodies: hair cells, skin cells, blood cells, muscle cells – everything in your body is made up of different kinds of cells. And every single cell in your body will die without the oxygen we breathe in. So how does that oxygen get all the way from your lungs to the cells in the tip of your little toe? It’s carried by your blood!

Blood is actually made up of many different things, just like soup is made up of many ingredients. If you put a drop of blood under a microscope and take a look, most of what you’ll see are red blood cells. These cells are shaped a little bit like a doughnut, and their job is to carry oxygen through your body. They are bendable to fit through your smallest blood vessel, and almost half of your blood is red blood cells – that’s why your blood looks red.

Blood cells float in a liquid called plasma that helps to carry them around your body. If you take all the red blood cells out of it, plasma actually a pale yellow colour. It’s full of dissolved salts and other good things that help keep your cells healthy.

Any elementary science class will tell you to avoid cutting yourself because it lets your plasma and blood cells escape. Ouch! The good news is that your blood also contains tiny bits of cells called platelets. If you get a cut, platelets will stick to the edge of the cut and to each other. Eventually, so many platelets stick together that they form a plug, or clot, that stops any more blood from getting out. But sometimes, if the clot doesn’t form fast enough, some tiny invaders might find their way in.

Have you ever gotten sick and been told that you’ve caught a bug? What that means is that tiny living things called microbes have gotten into your body and are producing nasty chemicals that make you ill. Those same microbes can sneak into your body through a cut. Fortunately, you have some pretty tough defenders – your white blood cells!

White blood cells are the biggest cells in your blood, and their job is to seek out and destroy any invading microbes that get in. If a white blood cell senses the chemicals made by a microbe, they will swallow up that microbe and digest it! Sometimes kids science is just like a video game — in the arcade game Pac-Man, our hero is just like your white blood cells, travelling around your bloodstream and gobbling up the invading microbe ghosts.

So next time you prick your finger, remember that in that tiny drop of blood there are hundreds of living cells fighting against the nasty microbes that want to make you sick. Your tiny drop of blood is a battlefield, but luckily you’ve got the white blood cells on your side!

Post by Sarah