Two sounds of nature are readily identified by those who spend consistent amounts of time in the garden: the buzz of the bee and the croon of the cicada.

Along with the chirps and melodies of the birds, these resonances create the music of the landscape.

The buzz of the bee is loudest when bumblebees vibrate flowers to release pollen; while the croon of the cicada is actually a call of courtship belted out by the males to attract the females of their unique species.

Bees are four-winged, flower-feeding insects with enlarged hind feet, branched or feathered body hairs, and generally a stinger. Honeybees and bumblebees are the most common with the bumblebee being larger and stronger.

The rapid wingbeats of bees create wind vibrations that humans hear as buzzing. The larger the bee, the slower the wingbeat resulting in a lower pitch of the buzz.

More vibrations causing the buzz are a result of the bees pulsating their wing muscles while shaking pollen off the flowers onto the bee’s body to be deposited on the next flower that is visited.

The bee brushes any remaining pollen onto pollen-carrying structures located on the mid-segments of its legs—often called the “bee’s knees”—carrying that pollen back to the hive to nurture the family and to aid in the manufacture of honey.

Bees are sociable and relatively extroverted; they will invite lone bees to join their commune. Honeybees live in hives or colonies that may contain 20,000 to 100,000 bees. Hives include one queen that creates all the broods for the hive (up to 1,500 eggs a day), hundreds of male drones, and thousands of female worker bees.

The worker bees must visit several thousands of flowers a day to make a tablespoon of honey. Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard has said “the honeybee is nature's "workhorse, and we take it for granted.”

Bees have been known to travel more than four miles to collect pollen and nectar. They communicate by a process called the “waggle dance” as a bee indicates the location of food sources to other bees.

Most bees gather pollen from a variety of plants while some “specialists” prefer collecting from plants with floral oils or those with a particular aromatic compound.

Bee keeping has become a profit-making industry and a popular hobby throughout the world with many beekeepers maintaining substantial numbers of hives, harvesting the honey for commercial sale, or in the case of “yard bees” where a hobbyist will look after one or two hives, selling his honey locally in a kind of cottage-industry approach.

It has been noted that some 10,000 years ago, humans attempted to maintain colonies of bees using hollow logs, wooden boxes, and woven baskets until better understanding of bee biology and habits allowed the construction of moveable comb hives, so honey could be harvested with no damage to the colony itself.

Thirty intact hives were found in an archeological site in the ruins of a city from 900 BCE (Before Common Era). As many as one hundred hives made of straw and unbaked clay were placed in orderly rows that may have accommodated more than a million bees with a certain potential annual yield of 1,100 pounds of honey. This discovery was evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in ancient Israel more than 3,000 years ago.

Cicadas

Cicadas are a “superfamily” of insects along with their cousins the leafhoppers, brandishing prominent eyes that are set wide apart, short antennae, and membranous web-like front wings. Cicadas are the earliest known fossil in temperate to tropical climates, typically living in trees, feeding on the sap, and laying their eggs in slits in the bark.

Even though they have five sets of eyes, they are notoriously bad flyers and will often bump into objects as they flit from tree to tree. Cicadas are harmless to humans as they do not bite or sting

. A cicada’s claim to fame is its singing ability. The high-pitched sound can be a mating call each significant to its species that attracts only females of its own kind allowing several species to coexist in the same habitat. Other courtship songs can be generally quieter and will be released only after the female has become drawn to the original calling song.

Besides the mating calls, there are distinct distress calls, usually a broken or erratic sound and encounter calls that ward off other cicadas vying for the attention of the same female. Cicadas are the only insects that are capable of producing these unique and piercing sounds.

Larger species can generate raucous cries in excess of 120 decibels at close range approaching the pain threshold of the human ear. Smaller species hum in such a high pitch that it cannot be heard by humans but can generate howls of pain and discomfit in the neighborhood dogs.

They disable their own tympana (ears) when calling to avoid causing damage to their own hearing. Cicadas sing most actively during the hottest hours of the day.

The singing of cicadas is not the result of stridulating as with crickets, but is generated from a noisemaking structure called a tymbal located below the abdomen. The abdomen itself is segmented and houses the reproductive organs and eggs of the females while in the males it is mostly hollow and used as a resonating chamber or sound box.

When the cicada contracts its internal muscles, the tymbals fold inward causing a clicking sound. As the muscles relax, another clicking sound is emitted. Rapid vibration of the membranes combines the clicks into continuous notes creating distinctive songs and acoustic signals.

After the mating ritual, the female cuts slits in the bark of the tree and deposits the eggs. When the eggs hatch, they drop to the ground and burrow into the earth emerging later as adults passing through a two-to-five-year life cycle, after which the males will shed their exoskeletons that can commonly be found still clinging to the bark of the tree.