![]() ![]() “Drones, by contrast, are quite lazy,” Wickman says. Meanwhile, other workers whose jobs keep them home tending honeycombs and cooling the nest work around the clock, but also take frequent breaks. But these guys strictly work the dayshift, and come home to relax when the sun goes down. Slate’s Forrest Wickman reports that these workers “spend nearly every hour of daylight outside” and entomologists have seen them making more than 100 foraging trips in a day. The honey bee workers that forage food for the hive often do work “all the day,” like in the poem. They put in honest work, unlike the cuckoo bees, but the amount of labor any one bee does varies with its role in the colony. Other bee groups-the stingless bees, bumble bees and honey bees-are social insects that live together and work cooperatively. When the cuckoo bee larvae hatch, they eat their hosts’ pollen stores and sometimes their eggs if mom didn’t feast on them already. Instead, they steal food from, and lay their eggs in, other bees’ nests. These so-called “ cuckoo bees” don’t collect pollen or build their own homes. Some bees don’t really do any work at all, and are parasites of other bee species. But it’s a little more complicated than poet Isaac Watts made it out be be when he wrote “How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour, / And gather honey all the day / From every opening flower!” If idioms are to be believed, bees are some of the most industrious animals around. ![]()
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