Bees communicate with each other about food sources using dances. The sounds from the movement of the bees are picked up by the tiny hairs on the bee’s head. Bees use the sun in navigation.
The honeybee’s hive has cells made of wax. This is where the queen bee lays her eggs. She can lay 1500 eggs in one day. When the larvae hatch, they are fed by the worker bees. The workers collect pollen and nectar from flowers. The pollen is used as a protein source and the nectar is an energy source. Some of the pollen lands on the pistils of the flower and results in cross-pollination. This is important for some crops and flowers. The relationship between the plant and the insect is called symbiosis.
Bees turn the nectar into honey. Workers must visit over four thousand flowers to make just a tablespoon of honey. Beekeepers must be very careful when they remove honey from the hive. They try not to hurt the bees. The beekeepers give sugar syrup to the bees to replace the honey that they take.
The queen is the mother of the hive. There is only one queen and each day she has to lay the 1000 or so eggs that will develop into new honeybees. Her strong pheromones (body smells) keep the colony working together and prevent the worker bees from trying to lay eggs.
The drones’ only work is to mate with a queen; only the fittest few pass their genetics on to the next generation. That role is important enough that they are fed by the workers of any hive. During the day, they congregate in areas 5 – 35 meters above the ground waiting for a young queen to come by. A queen will fly for miles to reach a far-distant congregation area, where she mates with multiple drones. Each drone, however, dies after mating. When the weather gets cold, the remaining drones are excess to requirements and the workers drive them out.
It is the thousands of worker bees who keep the colony going. From the day they are born they slave away without complaining; cleaning and guarding the hive, feeding the developing bee brood (babies), building the honeycomb, and collecting nectar to process into honey stores for the long winter when there are no flowers. The workers keep the hive cool in summer and warm in winter. And they communicate very efficiently too – they can tell their sisters where to find the best flowers, and the amount and quality of the nectar they will find there. They can tell if the queen is safe and if that new bee trying to creep in is a stranger from another hive coming to steal their precious honey.
Life Cycle
The honeybee goes through a number of development stages before becoming an adult. Whether it becomes a queen, a worker or a drone, all honeybees must make the transition through the four stages of metamorphosis; egg, larva, pupa and adult. The queen lays her eggs in the cells of the honeycomb. Fertilised eggs become workers (or a new queen) while unfertilised eggs become drones. The worker bees work hard feeding the rapidly growing larvae. Finally, the honeycomb cells are capped over so the larvae can spin their cocoons and pupate in private.
When the transformation from pupa to adult is complete, the young bee emerges from the cell to take its place in honeybee society. The process from egg to adult can take as little as 16 days for a queen or as long as 24 days for a drone. Once a worker emerges her life span can vary from just a few weeks to almost a year depending on the season, the food available and the work she has to do. The new worker bee is soft, fluffy and rather undeveloped. Over the next weeks various specialised glands will mature determining the work she does in the colony. The work includes cleaning, feeding the young brood, packing nectar and pollen in the cells, building wax honeycomb, guarding the colony finally graduating to nectar, pollen, propolis and water collection.
Honey
Honey is a thick liquid produced by certain types of bees from the nectar of flowers. While many species of insects consume nectar, honeybees refine and concentrate nectar to make honey. Indeed, they make lots of honey so they will have plenty of food for times when flower nectar is unavailable, such as winter. Unlike most insects, honeybees remain active through the winter, consuming and metabolising honey in order to keep from freezing to death. Early humans probably watched bears and other mammals raid bee hives for honey and then tried it themselves.
Bees collect nectar from flowering plants and store it in their honey sac in their abdomen where, by the action of the enzyme invertase, it is partially converted to honey. When back at the hive, they pass it on to the house bees who continue this change after which it becomes honey.
