Can bees bleed and how do they breathe

Do bees bleed?

You may have heard it said that if you pull the leg off an insect it will bleed to death because it lacks a clotting component in its blood. This does not apply to adult bees, since their "blood," actually a whitish body fluid called hemolymph, does clot to prevent large amounts of fluid loss after an injury. Justin Schmidt wrote about doing research at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson that involved "bleeding" bees to sample their body fluid, and he found that the fluid samples he extracted would clot in short order.

A bee's circulatory system does not move the body fluid under great pressure, and this minimizes the loss of fluid until clotting has a chance to close an opening caused by an injury. Hemolymph also contains cells that, like human white blood cells, defend the body against infection and gather to close openings that penetrate the exoskeleton.

Honey bee larvae do not appear to have a clotting system, but since they spend their entire time in a beeswax cell, injury or predation is unlikely with the exception of Varroa mites, which have become a threat over the past twenty years. These are external parasites that feed on the hemolymph of the developing larvae and create open wounds, making the larvae vulnerable to pathogens. If the larvae survive, there may be effects on their defenses or behavior that we do not yet understand.

How do bees breathe?

Answer: Bees breathe without lungs. Air enters through openings called spiracles on the sides of the bee body, and a network of tubes called trachea weave their way around organs and through tissues, allowing air to ooze throughout the bee's body. For larvae and inactive insects, this is how they breathe, taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide through this simple system.

But when a bee flies, it needs more oxygen and its flight muscles move more air through its body by expanding air sacs that are part of the respiratory system and drawing air in more forcefully. Then the spiracles contract and compress the air sacs, forcing the air deeper into the body so that more oxygen reaches the cells, and then the spiracles open and carbon dioxide is expelled.

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