The saying "busy as a bee" undoubtedly arose from the impression one gets observing bees buzzing around a hive. Streams of bees zoom in and out, foraging and delivering nectar and pollen, and inside the hive they seem to be constantly in motion - eating, grooming, fanning, foraging, cleaning, building, and taking out the garbage. But researchers who have actually watched individual bees for days at a time, keeping careful track of their activities, tell a different story, and the results are a little disappointing: bees are really not all that busy.
In 1894, a scientist named C. F. Hodge watched a group of bees all day for several days. He reported that no bee worked more than three and a half hours a day. Typically, one bee might crawl into an empty cell and lay there for hours. In the 1950s, the behavioral physiologist Martin Lindauer followed up Hodge's work with a more comprehensive study, and he confirmed that a typical bee spent about two-thirds of her time doing no productive work at all.
European honey bees can't see well enough to forage at night, so this is when some honey bee foragers typically sleep. Barrett Klein working with Tom Seeley determined that honey bees shift their foraging schedules depending on when resources are available, and this dictates to some degree when they can sleep.
Stefan Sauer and colleagues experimentally deprived foragers of sleep for a twelve-hour period in order to study their responses to the lack of sleep. Individual bees were placed into a glass cylinder with a light source equivalent to daylight and with free access to honey. The cylinder was secured to a motorized tilting device that produced one-second-long rolling movements, alternating with pauses of eleven seconds, effectively keeping the bees awake all night. The research team found that the exhausted bees compensated by sleeping more deeply the following night. Periods of time when their antennae were immobile were defined as sleep.
Some tropical breeds of bees have adopted a nocturnal lifestyle, probably in response to the dangers and availability of resources of the tropical rainforests where they live. In contrast to European honey bees , Africanized honey bees can see under the light of a full moon and have been known to forage under these light conditions. Specialist in nocturnal vision Eric Warrant at Lund University in Sweden points out that "at light levels at which we are nearly blind, our cats are out stalking prey, and moths are flying agilely between flowers. . . . The same is true of an enormous variety of animals inhabiting the eternal darkness of the deep sea."
Most of the animals in the world are primarily active in dim light, and research by Warrant and others has demonstrated that many of them see quite well. William Wcislo and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama observed that, although the light intensity at night may be as much as one hundred million times dimmer than daylight, the nocturnal sweat bees Megalopta genalis and M. ecuadoria have evolved a visual system that enables them to identify visual landmarks and navigate complex terrain in darkness. Their vision is only about thirty times more sensitive than that of diurnal bees, but specialized areas have been identified in the brains of these bees that seem to have the capacity to intensify the received images, and this may be what enables them to see well enough to forage at night.
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