Speaker Marion Lang - All About Bees

Tue, Nov 3rd 2015 at 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm


There was genuine delight when Junior Vice President John Spittal announced the amount of charity money raised from the previous week’s hugely successful Kilrymont Rotary Kingsbarns Charity Golf event.

Local charities, including TCCL Lodge will benefit by £5500.00.

Business matters were followed by a presentation from Marion Lang, a former executive of the Society of Scottish Beekeepers, and who maintains a beekeeping business at her home near Ceres.

Marion’s talk was on the subject of honey bees and their lifestyles and provided a rather unusual insight into what is a complex and very social society of insects.

She suggested bee colonies were not unlike mankind in its cities. Worker bees are all female and indeed do all the work, ranging from foraging for nectar, constructing honeycombs, manufacturing honey and so on. There can be up to 60,000 honey bees in a hive, the bulk of them workers. Meanwhile, drones are all male and there will be no more than a few hundred of them. Drones are usually referred to by beekeepers as “the playboys of the bee world”, as their only duty in life is to fertilise the queen bee. Following which they expire!

The queen herself is a fairly ruthless character. After she has hatched hundreds of eggs, she is capable of identifying any eggs which contain baby queens. Upon which she sets out to sting all of them to death….

Marion also explained the highly-developed senses of bees, such as their fascinating navigation systems and communications expertise.

Her talk was praised in the vote of thanks by George McIntosh, who was unsure whether he would be happy to be a drone and therefore have a fun-filled but rather short life!

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