'The King and I'
need to have a conversation about the birds and the bees because he's
got it so, so wrong. Here's his justification for polygyny:
A girl must be
like a blossom with honey for just one man
A man must be
like a honey bee and gather all he can!
To fly from
blossom to blossom a honey bee must be free
But blossom must
never fly from bee to bee to bee!
I can't imagine
Blossom or any other woman agreeing with him, but the irony is that
bees practice another form of polygamy – polyandry! Each queen
gathers all the males she can and those lucky fellows that consummate
the act promptly drop dead (read - It's raining men).
And it's just a
small point but those bees that 'gather all they can' -
they're female!
The King of Siam
in the 1956 movie musical clearly knew nothing about bees, but now it appears he was wrong
about the flowers too.
It's well known that
flowers do their utmost to attract visitors by looking pretty,
smelling nice and offering a sip from the honey pot. But they also do
something else to help them 'fly' from bee to bee to bee – they use
drugs!
Memory-enhancing
substances in the nectar can improve the bees recall about where the
flowers are located and a good dose of caffeine to boot, guarantees
those bees will be dancing like demons when they get back to their
hive. Bees dance to tell the rest of the colony about good food
sources and the more vigorous the dancing the greater the eagerness
for other bees to pay a visit to young Blossom.
So far from having
honey for just one bee, the flowers in effect 'fly from bee to bee to
bee'. Fair enough, but there's a downside to Blossom's promiscuity –
infectious diseases! Every tongue probing the flower nectaries risks
leaving or picking up a nasty infection, and not just from other
honey bees. Bumble bees can also transmit diseases like nosema to
honey bees visiting the same flower, and vice versa.
It's not normally a
problem; bees have been visiting flowers for millions of years, but
if disease carrying bumble bees or honey bees are bought into an
area, local infection rates can spike. This is particularly so when
flowers are scarce because the remaining few get many more visitors.
There's a simple
remedy; plant more flower. That way each flower will have fewer
visitors and harbour less disease, and even more nectar for those
that do call.
