Many organisms demonstrate extraordinary abilities to navigate our planet. Birds fly south for the winter, dolphins transverse the oceans, and bees forage for food up to 12 km from their hive. How do these insects and animals know where they’re at? How do they know where they’re going? How do they know how to get back to the hive? The answer is magneto reception. Magneto reception is the innate ability for bees and other animals to use the magnetic field of the planet to determine their direction and location. How do bees use magneto reception? Bees have organelle in their nervous system that have magnetite in them. These organelle act as magnetic receptors to help guide them.
Bees use many different stimuli to determine their location and direction. They have the task of finding nectar filled flowers that they will need to feed the hive. They must be able to travel to the source of food, return to the hive, communicate to other bees where the food sources are, and then go and retrieve the food. This requires a thorough method by which they can locate this food multiple times. These insects use the magnetic field of the planet to help them on their way.
WHAT IS MAGNETO RECEPTION?
Magneto reception is the ability of some animals to sense magnetic directions in the magnetic field of the earth. For many years, scientists thought that this was a pseudoscience. But many experiments that have proven otherwise. Scientist have found small organelle in the nervous system with bits of magnetite in them. Bees and other animals use these organelle to determine their direction and location.
In one experiment, bees were put in a maze that had a sucrose reward at the exit. They were able to find the sucrose, and return to it multiple times by memorizing the maze. The scientists then cut the ventral nerve cord between the thorax and the abdomen. This cord connects the insect to its magneto reception. The insects were still able to find the sucrose using smell, but their ability to find it was severely inhibited. Bee problems can be solved by a good Oklahoma exterminator.
OTHER METHODS OF NAVIGATION
Bees and other animals use other senses to guide them in navigation. They can smell the food they are after. They also use sight as a guiding sense. Bees can sense the location of the sun. What makes this remarkable, is that bees can use the sun even though it moves through the sky based on the time of day and the time of year. This means that they can adjust based on these factors. Your Oklahoma pest control company has more information.
Another experiment, using homing pigeon’s, demonstrated how animals use magneto reception in conjunction with other methods of navigation. These homing pigeon’s had magnets attached to their heads. They used earth magnets and electromagnets, and position them both north to south and south to north in relation to their head. Without these magnets, these pigeons were able to navigate to a food source directly. On sunny days with the magnets, they were able to get close and then correct once they were close enough to find the food source. And cloudy days with magnets attached to their heads, they couldn’t find the food source at all.
COMMUNICATION TO OTHER BEES
The vision of bees is somewhat different than ours. They see a full spectrum of colors, but these colors are shifted to the violet end. This means that they are mostly incapable of seeing reds, but are very capable of seeing ultraviolet light. Most flowers have ultraviolet patches known as nectar guides, to guide bees to the nectar parts of the flowers. They will travel back to their hive and communicate to their sister worker bees where they have found this nectar. If you are having an issue with bees, contact your Tulsa pest control company for help.
Karl von Frisch won the Nobel peace prize in 1973 for his work and studying bees and their communication. He took a beehive, and placed a food source near it. Then he watched the activities of the bees. He saw that the bees that found the food, would come back and do a dance to communicate the location of the food source. The angle at which they kept their body changed as the location of the sun change throughout the day. By this he deduced the suns role in the navigation of bees.
THE HIVE ORGANISM
Bees are a social insect. They live in a hive and have a specific role based on their duties to maintain the hive. The hive acts an individual itself, with each individual bee inside the hive doing its part. The hive has a queen whose responsibility is to lay the eggs. The other bees are workers, and perform tasks to maintain the hive such as foraging for food, protecting the hive, and caring for the young.
Labor is determined by the age of the bee. The youngest bees will start by cleaning the cells in the beehive. They were usually do this for the first three days of adulthood. After that they will act as nurses for the young larva for several days. Then, at day 20, they will stand guard at the entrance to protect the hive. After a few days of staying at the door of the hive, they will become foragers and will do this task for the rest of their life.
REMOVING BEES IN PEST SITUATIONS
Many people believe that it is illegal to remove bees. This is not always true. While it is true that bees are an important part of our ecosystem, it is also true that they can be pests. When bees build hives in our structures in places where contact with humans becomes conflict, beehives must be removed. If you were in a situation where are you have a beehive in a bad location, it’s time to call an Oklahoma exterminator. Here at TermMax Pest Control, we can help. We service the greater Tulsa area including Broken Arrow, Jenks, Bixby, Claremore, Catoosa, Sand Springs, Sapulpa, Owasso, Pratville, Coweta and more. Call us today for a free estimate. We are here to help!