Skip to main content

Thirst

The temperature is soaring in Delhi.  It's less than a month since we, Delhiites, cleaned our woolens and shoved them into the remote parts of the almirah and pulled out the cotton linen for the summer.  The temperature rises at the rate of one degree Celsius per day.  The very air outside scorches your skin.

It was not surprising to see honey bees trying to suck water at the taps outside the school's dining hall this morning.  The bees were not worried about the boys coming to wash their hands.  They flew away letting the boys wash and came back as soon as the boys were away.

I became curious about the honey bees' requirement of water. A simple Google search gave me the following information: [courtesy: http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/bee_photos_10.html]
Honey bees collect four substances, nectar to turn into honey for their food source, pollen as a protein source to rear the baby bees, propolis to seal crevices and coat the inside of the hive with an antimicorobrial coating, and water to mix with the baby bees' food and also to cool the hive.

A clean supply of water is absolutely essential for the operation of a honeybee colony. Bees use water for cooling the hive by evaporation, and for thinning honey to be fed to larva. Bees collecting water is almost as common a sight as bees on flowers. A strong hive on a hot day can use over a quart of water a day, this occupies 800 workers each making up to 50 trips to the water hole a day.

Human beings encroached into the realms of animals far beyond the desirable limits. Are they coming back to recapture their rightful areas?
Labels:

Comments

  1. MridulaMay 2, 2014 at 1:01 PM

    I leave some water for birds in an earthen pot but never gave a thought to the bees!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 2, 2014 at 1:16 PM

      This is the first time that I saw bees haunting water taps.

      Delete
  2. ManiparnaMay 2, 2014 at 3:00 PM

    First time for me too :-O..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 2, 2014 at 9:00 PM

      As we keep on creating a hotter and drier and more polluted world, there will be more 'firsts' coming, Maniparna.

      Delete
  3. UnknownMay 2, 2014 at 3:18 PM

    Even I didn't know about this. Temperature's soaring high in Durgapur as well. It's around 43 degree Celsius here. That last line of this article might be true and who knows what we would get to see in the future!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 2, 2014 at 9:01 PM

      Yes, Namrata, we may have a bizarre future ahead, who knows!

      Delete
  4. UnknownMay 2, 2014 at 4:07 PM

    I never knew about this :O

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 2, 2014 at 9:02 PM

      We will keep learning, Pankti. Probably, as we go ahead Nature will have much to teach us.

      Delete
  5. Poonam KhandujaMay 2, 2014 at 9:22 PM

    Learnt about a new face of nature, today. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. wingsMay 2, 2014 at 9:29 PM

    That's a wonderful research! It means, we won't be having honey of good quality in future due to scarcity of water!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 3, 2014 at 8:21 AM

      But, as I understand, honey bees won't take dirty water. Will they choose to die rather than take dirty water? I can't answer that.

      Delete
    2. wingsMay 3, 2014 at 5:53 PM

      No, I did not mean dirty water, sir. I meant that scarcity of water may lead honey bees to maintain their hives poorly.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalMay 3, 2014 at 8:41 PM

      Yeah, M. But who will survive in the long run? Bees or man?

      You know, I'm foreseeing a time when animals will take over the planet. H G Wells envisaged it a century back in his novel, Time Machine.

      Delete
    4. wingsMay 5, 2014 at 7:57 PM

      In a lighter vein, may I say men will become animals?.......:)

      Delete
    5. Tomichan MatheikalMay 5, 2014 at 9:53 PM

      :) Haven't they already?

      Delete
  7. VetirmagalMay 3, 2014 at 7:08 AM

    Yes, this is happening in our terrace pipe too. Few of them are always there. Now after a few weeks I see a big beehive in the neighbour's tree.( a few feet away) Leaky taps do help . They dont sting , even when we open the tap . They wait and come back!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 3, 2014 at 8:22 AM

      Exactly, Pattu, even I was surprised that when the students opened the tap the bees didn't attack them, they just flew away only to come back a little later.

      Delete
  8. AmitAagMay 3, 2014 at 10:41 AM

    What a shameful crime on our part! The unmindful human progress(?) and so called development is causing irreparable loss to nature:(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 3, 2014 at 11:49 AM

      It is indeed a serious affair, Amit. We have done a lot of damage to Nature, some of which are irreparable. I'm sure Nature will come back to haunt us in many ways.

      Delete
  9. IndraniMay 3, 2014 at 10:51 AM

    Great observation, I have seen some of them landing in my water pools.

    ReplyDelete
  10. NirMay 3, 2014 at 9:11 PM

    that is some cool info... though i don't think those bees could threaten humanity.. they will probably just die... which is also sad...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 4, 2014 at 11:37 AM

      They will die, Nir. Yes, that's the sad fact. I saw them dying under those water taps. I've been watching them.

      Delete
  11. JayantaMay 4, 2014 at 12:47 AM

    Dear Tomichan, I nominated you for Sunshine Blog award for your powerful topics and writings..Do check my post on the topic :-).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...
14 comments
Read more

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...
14 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more