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By Root 1356 0

bees had not come out just to defecate. I also doubted that they failed to get back into the hive only because of the cold since many of the bees hit the snow in fully powered dives. Might the bees (who had of course never seen snow before) have been disoriented by not seeing dark ground under them, and so they had accidentally dived into the powdery white and featureless snow? To find out I now spread wood shavings all around the hives, and I then provoked more bees to come out. Air temperatures were -8.3°C. Voila! Although many bees crashed as before, sixteen out of forty now made it safely back inside, whereas none had done so before even at considerably higher temperatures. Therefore, at least some of the earlier deaths were probably due to disorientation over the light featureless snow that slowed their ability to get back.

On January 22 of that year we had a thaw and temperatures finally reached a few degrees Celsius above freezing. The shavings were still spread around. This time there were fewer than a dozen new dead bees near the hive itself, but there were at least sixty strewn all over the snow at 100 to 200 feet. Several bees had even flown up to 100 yards beyond the hive before landing in the snow. Why did they fly so far? I gathered up as many as I could find, and again examined their bowels. This time twenty-five of them had voided but the rest still retained their fecal load. Unloading is thus something that they do, but it seemed more and more unlikely that the primary reason the bees risk their dangerous exiting is for gut evacuation.

By Friday the twenty-sixth, it had again warmed to just barely above freezing, and new snow had covered the many dead bees so the new corpses could be counted. I counted 225 bees that had recently crashed into the snow in the hive area. I then watched my hives for forty minutes in early afternoon. Many bees were still coming out spontaneously. I kept my eye on individual bees, noting their typical back-and-forth orientation flights, circling, and then their departure into the distance till they were out of sight or till they crashed! Of 171 bees that I followed visually, 96 crashed into the snow, while 52 went out of my vision into the distance. I saw only three defecations, finally convincing me that although the bees proximally “cleanse” on some of their so-called “cleansing flights,” the ultimate reason for those flights had to be something different. Could the flights be scout bees searching for flowers to get food, or water to drink?

On New Year’s Day I had picked willow twigs and brought them into the house. In two weeks male catkins were shedding pollen. Quaking aspen buds brought in at the end of January opened in only four days. It was not yet spring, but the plants were ready. The bee cannot know if or when the red maple, willow, and poplar trees in the surrounding bogs and forest will burst forth with their very brief one-time offerings. The colony can’t know by divine inspiration, and it cannot afford to miss the early spring harvest. But it can afford to lose some workers to buy information.

Red maple. Female

Male

Quaking aspen. (Populus tremuloides)

There is a huge premium for swarms to leave the colony early in spring, to allow for sufficient time to find a new nest site, build honeycomb, rear young, and build up the large honey stores required to get them through the winter. The only way for the bees to get information on when the first blooms are available, so that swarms can be launched sufficiently early to accomplish all this, is to venture out and search. A few hundred, or a few thousand, worker casualties may be a small price to pay for being at the first bloom (or being first at the bloom). After all, the colony is a superorganism whose success is measured by the reproductive output of one queen, and the queen’s output depends on honey and pollen input.

The fifteenth of March was finally a “warm” (8° to 10°C) sunny day. On this day I saw a first no-doubt-honest-to-goodness cleansing flight: On this day the air was loudly abuzz with