Bees are pretty remarkable creatures. Each has five eyes and six legs, and their two pairs of wings beat more than 11,000 times per minute.
One hive can contain as many as 50,000 bees, and in one year some can produce a hundred pounds of honey.
Bees have populated our planet for some 30 million years, but in the nighttime sky we can see a beehive that’s been around more than 20 times longer.
It’s known as … well, the Beehive, and it can be found among the stars of the faint constellation Cancer.
Astronomers know the Beehive as an open star cluster, and it’s visible every spring night if you’ve got some patience, along with a nice clear, dark sky.
High in the western sky after dark, look for the bright star Regulus, part of the constellation Leo.
It marks the bottom of a backward question mark of stars that might be imagined to outline the lion’s head.
Lower in the west lie two nearly equally bright stars known as Castor and Pollux. These mark the heads of the twin brothers of ancient Greek mythology: Gemini.
This star cluster lies about one-third of the way between Pollux and Regulus. It appears as a faint, hazy smudge of light to the unaided eye — assuming, of course, your sky is dark and clear, and you have good eyesight. If not, check out the area with binoculars, and you’ll be sure to find it.
The Beehive has been known at least as far back as the ancient Greek writer Aratus in 260 B.C.
Some 130 years later, Hipparchus listed it in his star catalog as “Little Cloud” or “Cloudy Star.” Makes sense, as that’s exactly how it looks.
But ancient sky watchers didn’t just catalog this sight; they used it to forecast the weather.
Both ancient philosophers Aratos and Pliny wrote that when it was visible the skies would be fair, but when it wasn’t, a storm was on its way.
Makes one wonder just how a cluster of stars more than three thousand trillion miles from us could foretell weather on Earth, but in a strange way, it can help.
It works fairly well because high, thin cirrus clouds — which may be invisible at night — often precede a storm and can easily obscure this faint cluster while leaving the brighter stars seemingly unaffected.
When astronomers turned the newly invented telescope toward this “cloudy star” in the 17th century, they learned its true nature.
Today, even binoculars show this smudge as a beautiful cluster of hundreds of stars that inspire its proper name: the Praesepe or Beehive, perhaps because, through a telescope, it appears as a mass of bees swarming around their hive.
We now know the Beehive lies some 577 light years from us, meaning its light we see tonight began its long journey toward our eyes in the year 1447.
If you view the sky from a dark location far from the blinding lights of a city, you’ll discover the Beehive isn’t that tough to find.
I hope you’ll get out one night soon to enjoy our little apian friends glistening in the heavens!
