Inside the egg, the cells begin to divide and differentiate into various tissue types, including the embryo. The egg contains the original fertilized ovum along with a yolk. The worker bee egg is soft and covered with a flexible covering called the chorion. Compared to bee eggs in general, honey bee eggs are unusually small, a situation made possible by a staff of nurse bees that continually feed the larvae as they grow. (3) Some of the distribution in size is due to genetic differences among queens, and some is just normal same-queen variation. Honey bee eggs are often described as rice-like, but they are much smaller than typical grains of rice, measuring anywhere from 1.2 to 1.8 mm long by 0.4 mm wide, and weighing from 0.12 to 0.22 mg. Once her scent-marked egg is placed, the queen wanders off to the next available cell, confident her message is clear. Furthermore, it assures that any drones that are raised carry the queen’s genetics exclusively. Once they are discovered, renegade worker eggs are eaten by the egg police, an act which conserves nutrients within the colony and assures that workers - not drones - develop in worker cells. (2) The coating contains chemical odors that laying workers cannot produce, thus enabling police bees to distinguish between genuine queen-laid eggs and imposter eggs that laying workers sometimes deposit in the brood nest. As an egg leaves her body, the queen coats it with a compound that lets her workers know that she alone laid that particular egg. Honey bee queens use an assortment of pheromones to achieve colony goals, and “egg-marking signal” illustrates her control. Image by xiSerge from Pixabay Egg marking A queen decides whether to lay a male or a female egg. The queen carefully centers her egg in a brood cell and glues the end to the floor so the entire egg stands as vertical as the Washington Monument. Since the question of implementation is above my pay grade, I will skip it entirely and describe the first days of a worker bee’s life beginning immediately after the sex decision is made, at the point where the fertilized egg leaves the queen’s body to reside within a sweet-smelling waxen chamber. Robert Nichols, a member of the transportation committee and a former Texas Transportation Commission member, says member want the diversions to stop, but last-minute budget machinations may do the opposite.This article first appeared in American Bee Journal, Volume 160 No 5, May 2020, pp. What about the so-called diversions out of the highway fund? Well, it's a mixed blessing, but transportation-minded senators are saying the Legislature is set to fail, here too. (Top lawmakers say what many have been saying for a long time now: We don't believe you.) As a result, the commission is weighing delays to many projects that were expected to be paid for by the borrowing. TxDOT says the money for debt service may be enough to cover most of the initial debt service, but only for the first year or two - and says they'll have to have more money to cover the borrowing costs as soon as 2011. With both chambers' budget bills passed, and conference committee members scrambling to come up with a single piece of legislation both sides can agree on, you may ask, has the Legislature kept those promises?Īpparently not. Secondly, they promised to stop spending $1.5 billion every two years out of the gasoline tax receipts to pay for DPS and other non-transportation related expenses. What they promised in return - and it was a strict, unambiguous commitment - was to, first, add enough money into the general fund for transportation to cover the debt payments that TxDOT would incur by issuing the bonds. What they wanted was TxDOT to issue more debt so it could build new roads, which were quickly becoming more expensive and more desperately needed. Last August, the leaders of the House, Senate and the governor sent a joint letter to Texas Transportation Commission chairwoman Deirdre Delisi making two promises and one demand. What follows is a handicapping assessment of what to watch for, and a guide to what I'll be keeping an eye on as I spent the next week or so in the capital.īUDGET. But like a high school senior's end-of-semester push to avoid summer school, a lot can be accomplished in the final 11 days. Today is Day 129 of the 2009 Texas Legislature, and you may be asking yourself, 'What do our lawmakers have to show for their labors, when it comes to transportation?'
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