Silk Bees: Providing a little more than Honey

Silk is a remarkably tough material and many associations are competing to make the first artificial silk. Very few people have an idea that honeybees produce silk fabrics, but they do and that has been proved.

Introduction

No one of us had any slightest of idea that bees can be the ones who can produce silk. The mothers of silks have always been moths, silkworms, butterflies and lately spiders too joined the community using it mostly for web making. Fibre2fashion had an elite discussion in this regard with Dr. Tara Sutherland, a renowned scientist of Entomology wing, CSIRO, Australia.

Bees, as well as ants, produce silk and the distinctive feature carried by their silk is the toughness they have. They have a particular structure of molecule that differentiates it with large structure of proteins as in moths and spiders. It has an arrangement wherein the cocoon twirls with each other providing a light weighted tough silk. After acknowledging the productive biology of bees, the genes of bull dog ants, weaver ants and bumblebees are compared to theirs. Though the silk of Ants and Bees is produced by larvae in the similar natural process and holds almost same characteristic features, yet they are used for different purposes and in a different way.

Process of study

The cells in which the larvae pupate are supported by the silk they produce. Larvae of bumblebee rotate cocoons in wax hives (which can be used again for storage purpose), the larvae of bulldog ant protects the lone cocoons by spinning around them during the pupation process and last but not the least, the larvae of weaver ants are used to make big collective nests from fresh leaves.

This tough and strong silk is a distinct production by these sharp, prickled bugs. These insects are much superior in the hierarchy of the Evolutionary tree and these silks mark their evolution around 155 million years back. These bugs have the tendency to produce silks of harder texture and stronger structure in comparison to what has been the actual silk definition like. In interview with Fibre2fashion, Dr. Tara says, "The process is still in the early discovery stage".

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