CHASING BEES
you wouldn’t hesitate. You’d follow the bees. -
jada, the low place between mountains, 10 or 15 miles walk- ing through tall cacti and broad, wandering washes with a backpack loaded for a handful of days. Where did the bees hole of a tree? Damp gravel at the bend of a wash? I wouldn’t have thought about water being out here, my eyes aiming for the mountains ahead, home of the tinajas. I walked through wash gravel parched almost every day of was beyond me. I was hearing about it second hand. Bees need water to keep hive temperatures down. Over
100° F, pupae and adult bees begin to die. Water is fanned and spit inside, where it evaporates and in the process cools the air. In a 2016 study out of Cornell, hives were put under heat lamps, and those with access to water stayed cool from quickly exceeded lethal temperatures. When water was re- turned, hive temperatures dropped. The study, led by author and bee behavior specialist Thomas Seeley, found that work- er bees in hot, dry conditions were stockpiling water in the hive, and some, what Seeley calls “water bottle bees,” were bulging with it in their abdomens, acting as storage vessels. Today was in the high 80s heading for 90s, not at their temperature threshold. More likely, these foragers were bringing water back to prevent the hive from drying up, as sure a way to die as heat. Humidity in the broodnest needs to be around 75 percent, while the surrounding desert drops to low teens and single digits. The water need is constant. This region is known as the Devil’s Highway. The num- ber and regularity of deaths and severe dehydration along gallon jugs in their hands face horizons of nothing but arid- ity. This is where a humanitarian aid worker was arrested for vehicle, another party, distances rippled in mirage. The mere thought of water, the notion it could be out there, seems dangerous. For my task, I started looking for steep angles of rock and plunging, shaded draws in the mountains that could cup and hold water. I used old maps and journals. A Jesuit priest, fa- ther Eusebio Kino, crossed through here in the 17th century, taking note of larger water sources, his distances measured in leagues. I turned leagues into miles and came upon some of near to the top, each of them ringed with bees, their abdo- mens pumping. Or just follow the bees. They’ll take you to the desert’s scarcest commodity. Sometimes it’s to a tiny, greening pool they found on a disk of cow dung, or a knot-hole in the side of a tree, the rain-water orange, no use to other wildlife but a lifeline for the bees.
Pumping industriously at its edge, 20 or 30 bees worked the water.
Seven bees, ten, twelve, twenty, zoomed around me, not a pinpoint, a hunk of granite sticking out of a barren plane. I growing around its base where rainwater washed off, limbs scrawny and reaching. I wouldn’t have thought to look here. Struggling from thirst, I’d go around the landmark, trying it for shade if anything. I scrambled up its side where the rock had splintered, its salt and pepper crystals easy to grip. Bees were funneling in and out of a shadow, a crack. I climbed to it and saw inside a dark, slender mirror. Pumping indus- triously at its edge, 20 or 30 bees worked the water, some landing, some taking off, most open-jawed, mouth parts sub- merged, abdomens expanding. Farther than two kilometers, water’s not worth the trip.
load is absorbed from the crop into the bee’s midgut during with next to nothing. They’re supposed to come back full- cropped, exchanging their water through the mouth back at the colony where a stream of in-hive bees unload the return- ing forager. The need for water is communicated by the vigor with
which it is taken. When more is needed, the hive mates gath- er it quickly from the mouth of the forager, who speeds away for another load. When the need lessens, the unloading slows and foraging backs down. In Seeley’s 2016 study, where he and his colleagues turned heat lamps onto broodnests, heat didn’t send water collector bees straight into action. Instead,
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