by McKayla Holson, Editorial Editor
Honeybees don’t have lungs; they breathe through a complex system of tracheas and air sacs.
I know, pretty crazy and pretty cool.
I first learned about this through a news article about the honeybees that were kept on top of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The smoke from the fire essentially just made them loopy and go to sleep, it didn’t suffocate them like someone might originally think.
After hearing about those honeybees, I decided to spend a little time researching how honeybees breathe. If you know me, or if you’ve read my other editorial in this paper, you know that I love bees.
In this open circulatory system, the internal organs of the honeybees are bathed in a mixture of blood and lymphatic fluid called hemolymph. This also means they do not have veins or arteries.
Jamie Ellis with the American Bee Journal referred to hemolymph just as bee blood. Ellis said the open circulatory system just means the hemolymph freely circulates the bee’s body cavity instead of being pumped through veins. Ellis said the hemolymph does not transport oxygen. She said it instead transports nutrients and hormones to various body tissues. She also said the hemolymph picks up waste products inside the body and takes them to excretory organs. Turns out hemolymph is pretty import because it also aids in heat transfer and can be a reservoir for food.
An article by Bee-Health said oxygen is vacuumed into the body through little openings in the segments, or spiracles, by the air sacs expanding. Once the spiracles are closed, the air sacs are compressed to force air into the smaller tracheas. These tracheas decrease in size until individual tubules reach the individual cells.
It’s amazing to me that something so tiny can be so complex.
If anybody has any tidbits of information about bees, or any fun and interesting facts, please send them my way. My email is mrholson30@rangers.nwosu.edu. I love learning new things about bees!