A Little Research...Bees Please!

1. What’s the author’s purpose?
2. Name a fiction and nonfiction detail.
3. Name 2 places I found information.
Answers are at the end of this post.

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I started a middle grade chapter book about ants 6 years ago. I took it to an SCBWI critique and discovered children’s fiction has to be factually correct. Who knew?

I’d written a sentence, 1 sentence on the first page about an ant’s heart pounding. Bruce Hale, my reader, asked if ants had hearts. I said I don’t know, and he said, you will, if you want to be published. That’s when researching became part of my writing.

Later bees came into the story so I did bee research. I googled and looked at different sources. I made sure multiple sources confirmed my facts. These are my need-to-know bee facts:
* Their jaws are called mandibles. They use them to carry and construct things. They’re compound tools, like our jaws and hands.
* Their antennae help them sense the world around them.
* Bees have compound/multiple eyes. Drones (male bees) have the biggest eyes in the bee word.
* Only females have stingers. Sorry drones, no stingers for you.
* All workers are female whether they work inside or outside the hive.
* Drones have one job, to mate with a queen. They don’t work in the hive. They don’t collect pollen, and they’re kicked out before winter.
* Bees have queens. They have 1 job, to lay eggs. Worker bees take care of them, keeping them clean and fed.
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My story became a mixture of fiction/nonfiction. My ants ride on bees. Real ones don’t. I wanted 3 ants onboard. I googled and compared their size. The ants fit, at least in a story!
 
I also wanted my ants to fly through the hive, They can’t. Why not? I called a bee keeper. He said the tunnels are only big enough to crawl through, so my ants had to crawl to meet the queen. I used the pictures below to help me imagine it, so I could write it.​​

​This year I now work on Scrivener. It’s great because I can put text files beside pictures and videos. My ants were crawling through a tunnel, scrunched down to fit inside. The 2 screens helped me see my error.  Ants are

smaller than bees, so I rewrote part of a chapter to make my words fit the facts. Neither major nor minor ants would scrunch down to hike a tunnel.​

But my writing still wasn’t clear enough. My critique friends asked about the tunnels and the queen. You can’t write clearly if you can’t picture it. So I wrote questions for bee expert,  Don Steinke. He's got his own Bee World. He tried to answer, but finally told me to come for a visit. It worked! At this month’s critique the ants and bees passed muster, finally! Here's what I learned about them:

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This is Don. He pulled out a frame from one of his hives. It’s man-made but similar to what bees create in the wild. A picture, better yet the real deal, is worth 1000 words. Thanks, Don!​

This is a close-up of the frame. The edge is wood. The rest is a plastic sheet with thousands of dimples on both sides. The workers add a little beeswax, and those dimples become the honeycomb. That’s where the queen lays her eggs She starts in the center of the cell frame and lays them in an organized pattern. Older queens lay less eggs and are less organized. Getting old isn’t easy, for bees or humans!
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A queen lays about 1500 eggs a day. They’re the size of a grain of rice. If the egg is fertile, it will become a female worker. If not, it’s a male, a drone. After 3 days the egg hatches into a larva. Worker bees feed it honey, royal jelly and plant liquids for 2 or 3 days, depending on what the larva will become. Then workers cap the cell in beeswax. Inside the larva spins a cocoon. It eats its way out in 7-14 days depending on what it is. New queens come out first, workers next, and drones last. The new adult goes to work immediately. Growing up isn’t fun!

When you do research, you usually learn more than you need to know. For my writing I just needed to picture the hive, and how bees travel across it. Basically wild or domestic, the hives look a lot alike. They both have honeycombs, and the passageways are the same size.
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Inside either hive bees crawl across the frame, anywhere on the frame. It’s not like ants, who dig tunnels into the dirt. They only travel through those tunnels. Bees use the hole as their tunnel to go to the backside, or to another frame. (FYI, the hole is there to help the bee keeper extract honey.) In the wild bees leave holes for travel. Read on…Don told me more about bees. Who knows? I might need it in another chapter!

​Do you remember how clean the frame was? The pictures show what happens after it’s used. The dark areas are caused by two things: 1) Some cocoons get stuck in the cell. The workers can’t clean them out. 2) Workers’ feet stain the comb as they go in/out to 

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care for the larva. It’s called travel stain.
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If you want light-colored honey, use a queen excluder. It keeps the queen out so she can’t lay eggs.   ​​

This is Don’s beeswax. He wraps it in a filter, like cheesecloth. Then he heats it in water. The yucky stuff stays in the filter. The good beeswax melts, then cools. Don lifts the beeswax out and sells it at Bee World,  with honey of course!

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​A Little Research… Bees, Please!
1. What’s the author’s purpose?
My author’s purpose was to inform how and why I research fictional details.
2. Name a fiction and nonfiction detail.
Fiction example: Ants ride on bees.    
​Nonfiction: Queen bees can lay 1500 eggs a day.
3. Name 2 places I found information.        Google and Don Steinke’s Bee World

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