Script

I cracked on with a script because then I know the structure for the animation. Therefore my can properly sort out my story board. I wanted a male voice for the narration so I had my friend on architecture do the voice for me. The first recording was a bit fuzzy, so a re-sit is going to happen. I couldn't fit all the facts and figures about bees into a short animation, simply the recording of the voice over was more than four minutes so I'm going to have to animate like a mad woman. If I were to make an animation featuring all the information I had collated from the books previously mentioned in this blog I could have gone on for well over half an hour. I was wondering whether to include more humour, to make the animation more engaging, but then again, I don't want to complicate things too much. Just worried the visuals will be too repetitive, being the inside of the hive and a lot of bees wiggling about on the screen. Going to try and over come this with varied settings and backgrounds. Playing with colour perhaps?


SCRIPT:

There are many different types of Bee,  but perhaps the most fascinating of all is the honey bee. And not simply because it makes honey, which is quite delicious. There is much more to this insect than meets the eye.

Bees are incredibly busy insects and work up to eight hours a day during the spring and summer to make honey. There are three different ranks of honeybee, workers drones and the queen. The ones that collect nectar to make the honey are worker bees. They begin this job at only three weeks old.

This honey bee began her life in a beehive which contains 50,000 to 100,000 bees.  

The queen bee lays tiny white eggs inside the beehive, around 1,500 everyday during the spring and summer, She lays these eggs in cell chambers.

Most of the eggs that hatch will become worker bees. These are all female. The other eggs become male and these are called drones. A drone’s only job in it’s life is to mate with the queen, he does no other work at all. After a drone has mated with the queen he dies.

The egg develops into a larva, which is fed royal jelly, this comes out of a gland from a worker bees head. When the larva is 3 days old the worker bee starts feeding it beebread, a mixture of honey and pollen.

Once the larva is five days old the worker bees will seal the cell with wax. The larva then covers herself with a cocoon, and becomes a pupa. For the next three weeks the Pupa will transform and change until she has become a full grown bee!

She then bites her way through the wax seal on her cell and begins to clean the hive. The queen will not lay eggs in a dirty cell so the worker bees get rid of leftover bits of wax, cocoon and dirt from the empty cells. They get rid of these things by eating it!

It takes between 15 and 30 bees 40 minutes to clean a cell.

So for the first three days of a bees life she cleans, and cleans and cleans.

After that she feeds the larvae and checks them. Nurse bees check on each larva more than a thousand times a day.

The bees body then begins producing wax, it comes from the glands within a bees abdomen. She uses this wax to build the cells in which the queen lays her eggs. Though some of the cells will be used to store honey. This is called honeycomb. These cells are tilted so the honey doesn’t drip out. 

The bees then take care of the queen by cleaning her, carrying away her waste, grooming her and even gathering around her with other worker bees and flapping their wings to cool her off.

Soon the worker bee stops making as much wax. Her new main job is to unload the nectar other bees bring to the hive. She will eat some of it and store the rest in the honey cells.

She begs the other bees for the nectar by beating her antennae against the antennae for the bee that has been out collecting nectar. She puts her tongue into the bee’s mouth and eats the nectar that the other bee regurgitates. This nectar is stored in the bees honey stomach. Which is separate from her other stomach.

A bee’s body has three different sections, it’s head, its thorax, and it’s abdomen.

Each part of a bee though has a special function that helps them do their work. The bees eye can track the position of the sun and uses this to navigate to flowers and back to the hive. Their wings enable them to fly. Their hind leg has a pollen basket that stores pollen collected from flowers. It also has a pollen brush which rubs pollen from one plant, onto others as the bee travels from flower to flower. This pollenates the flower. The bee also has a stinger for defense.

When a worker bee is just over two weeks old she begins to guard the hive. Guard bees stay at the entrance of the hive and protect the colony from wasps, animals, and other bees who would try to steal the honey!

Guard bees recognize bees from their hive because of their smell. The queens smell and taste is passed from bee to bee when they pass on food, therefore all the bees from the same colony smell the same.

A bee will defend against animals by using her stinger, this sting stays in the animals skin and part of her insides also stay there. Once a bee has stung it will die. The smell given off by a bee’s sting is similar to that of a banana. Other bees are drawn to this smell and try to stink in the same area.

When the bee is three weeks old it begins collecting nectar. She lands on a plant and sucks the nectar through her proboscis, a long flexible tube on her head. She collects as much as she can carry and then flies back to the hive. This nectar is brought back to the hive where other worker bees will store it in honey cells. The water in the nectar evaporates and this makes the nectar become thick. It becomes honey.

A worker bee lives for about six weeks in the spring and summer. Three of those weeks are spent gathering nectar, making about 400 trips. She only makes about seven grams of honey in her life!

So when you next taste some delicious honey, remember the honey bee and how hard it has worked to make it!