All About Bees
Humans have always been fascinated by honeybees. This is because these insects, which are members of the Hymenoptera family, not only produce delicious, naturally sweet honey, but also play an absolutely essential role in Pollinating crops, plants and trees.
How they look and how they see
Honeybees are brightly coloured, usually with alternating bands of black and yellow or orange, to warn potential predators that they have a sting and to warn honey thieves away from their hives. Only female bees possess a sting. Like most insects, honeybees see through compound eyes. These are made of many hundreds of small simple eyes called ommatidia. This means that honeybees see the world as a mosaic of colours that only become clear when the insect is very close to them.
Beehives and colonies
Honeybees live together in communities called colonies and make their homes in beehives. In the wild, a colony will contain about 20,000 honeybees. A domestic hive usually contains about 80,000 honeybees. They work together in a highly organised structure, where each caste has specific tasks to perform. The castes are: Queens, Drones and Workers.
TopQueens, drones and workers
Queens
There is only one queen in each hive and her purpose in life is to make more honeybees. She will live between two and eight years and will lay up to 2,000 eggs a day! Measuring up to 20mm, she is larger than other honeybees, with a longer abdomen. Her mouth is designed for chewing and she can use her stinger many times. When a Queen Bee dies, worker bees in the hive select other larvae and feed them with Royal Jelly, a rare, milky, bitter-tasting substance. This special food makes the larvae become sexually active. When ready to mate, the Virgin Queen chooses a warm, sunny Spring day and goes on a nuptial flight high above the Earth, attended by a dozen or more worker bees, who will mate with her in mid-air.
Drones
Drones are male honeybees and have no stinger. A drone will live for about 8 weeks and only a few hundred will live in a colony at any time. A drone's job is to mate with a new queen. For this reason, a drone's eyes are larger than a worker's, so that he can spot the Queen during her nuptial flight. At the end of the summer season, drones are no longer needed, so will be driven out of the hive to die.
Workers
Worker honeybees perform all the different tasks needed to keep the hive functioning. There are many more workers than any other honeybee in the hive and they are all sterile females. Worker honeybees born early in the Spring season will live about 6 weeks, whilst those born later in the season survive until the following Spring. When young, a worker is called a House bee and works in the hive, constructing honeycomb, rearing broods, tending the Queen and the drones, keeping the hive clean and keeping it cool by beating her wings. At this stage in her life she is also responsible for defending the hive against intruders such as wasps, that want to get at the honey stored in the honeycombs.
As she gets older, the worker becomes a Field bee. A Field bee flies outside the hive to gather nectar, pollen and water, as well as sticky plant resins used in the construction of the hive. A Worker honeybee has a pollen basket called a corbiculum on each hind leg, and an extra stomach in which she transports nectar from the flower back to the hive. She also has four special glands on the underside of her abdomen. These secrete beeswax to make or cap honeycomb. Worker honeybees have a stinger which can only be used once - it rips out of her abdomen after use and she dies.
TopPollen and Nectar Sources
When they become Field bees, the honeybee searches for two food sources - Pollen and Nectar. Pollen is transported in the corbiculum , Nectar in the bee's extra stomach. Pollen is collected because it provides a valuable source of proteins and micro-nutrients for the members of the colony to feed on. Nectar is regurgitated by the Field bees in to the honeycomb, where it will be ripened into honey. One of the many miracles of honey is that, on any given day, Field bees will forage for only one specific food source - scientists have not yet been able to understand who decides or how this daily choice is communicated to the colony. Each hive contains a honeycomb pollen 'library', with the colours of different pollens beautifully laid out, light to dark.
Honeycomb
Honeycomb is found at the heart of the beehive. This miracle of insect engineering is made up of two-sided panels of perfectly uniform six-sided cells made from beeswax. Beeswax is produced from glands on the underside of a young Worker bee's abdomen. House bees then take that beeswax and form it with their mouths into honeycomb. There are two uses for comb: Broodcomb and Honeycomb. Broodcomb is the nursery into which the Queen lays her eggs and in which baby bees are raised. Honeycomb is used to store honey and pollen. When a cell is full of honey it is capped by House bees with a thin layer of beeswax. It is then that the beekeeper can harvest the honey.
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