Honeybee

The animal featured on the cover of Oracle Performance Tuning is the honeybee, appreciated worldwide as a pollinator of crops and producer of honey.

Honeybees are highly social creatures. A single hive or colony usually contains one queen (the only fertile female), fifty- to sixty-thousand workers (all sterile females), and a few hundred drones (the only males). Workers are responsible for locating and collecting the pollen, nectar, water, and resin necessary to the hive. When a worker locates such a source, she returns to the hive and performs a beedance. This dance communicates precise instructions -- both distance and direction -- enabling other workers to make a beeline to the booty. It takes about ten million such worker-trips to gather enough nectar to make one pound of honey. Workers also build and maintain the hive, and feed the colony.

There is no biological difference between female bees at birth. Queens are simply given larger cells in which to develop, and are allowed to continue their privileged diet of "royal jelly" long after the other developing bees are cut off from the delicacy. Royal jelly is a secretion generated from the glands of young workers. Worker larvae are nourished by it during their first six days of existence, and drones eight, while the queen gets it until she is fully grown. The first thing a new queen will do upon emergence from her cell is deliver a death sting to all the other larval queens. (The previous queen will have vacated the hive with a small entourage a few days before.) After a week or two, the new queen will mate with a few drones (who die immediately after copulation). The rest of the drones are then put out of the hive to starve. The queen returns to the hive and begins her job of laying over a thousand eggs a day.

Honeybees are native to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In Ancient Greece, honeybees were associated with a famous oracle. The regular god of prophecy was Apollo, who presided over the greatest of Greek oracles, at Delphi. Apollo gave his tricky brother, Hermes, a piece of the action on a smaller shrine farther down the slopes of the same mountain, Mt. Parnassus, where the prophecy was given by three honeybee-maidens, all sisters. Apollo gave them the ability to speak the truth, which they willingly did if they were fed honey and honeycombs; if not, they buzzed and buzzed and told only lies.

researched and written by Michael Kalantarian
(with help from Lenny Muellner)