Summary Of Sweetness And Light By Hattie Ellis

Sweetness and Light, by Hattie Ellis, is about the history and biology of bees. Bee biology is the main study being covered throughout the entire book. It is very interesting to learn that there is evidence of bee existence for over 800,000 years. In Africa there is cave art of bees that allow biologist to predict their time beginning time of existence. There are three types of honeybees which are the queen, drone, and worker bees. The queen bee is the head of the hive that has the most important job which is to give birth to all the new drone and worker honeybees. The queen mates with a drone bee and is able to lay an average of a million eggs throughout her whole lifetime. The drone bees main purpose is to mate with the queen to produce more bees. The worker bees have the most tasks because they clean the cells, tend and feed the larvae and pupae, build and repair the honeycomb, receive and process the honey, pack honey in the cells, ventilate the hive, guard the …show more content…
The two men had made many discoveries of the bees, but they mainly wanted to know about the reproduction. The hypothesis made was that the queen and drone fertilized eggs externally and the fertilization was affected by the time the queen and drones left the hive. To solve this question Huber and Burnens stationed themselves outside of a hive and took many notes on the appearance of the queen. The two scientists realized that “the posterior part of her body was filled with a whitish substance, thick and hard, the interior edges of her vulva were covered with it” (pg. 111). Two days later the men went back to check on the queen and her stomach was enlarged and she had laid about 100 eggs. After repeating this process many times, Huber and Burnens concluded that the “queen had been fertilized on what we now call the virgin flight”