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All About Bees |
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Bees Story |
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| A Queen Honeybee |
A queen honeybee is a very special creature. The queen is the mother of all of the bees of the beehive. There is only one queen in a colony of honeybees that may number up to 80,000 members. Without constant egg-laying by the queen the bee colony would soon die. Genetically speaking, the queen is responsible for contributing her own characteristics, (along with the male drones), to the bees of the hive. Thus, the bees of the hive are, indeed, "made from the same mold" as the queen.
Biologists interested in nutrition point to the queen as an example of how diet can make an |
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incredible difference in the development of an animal. The only difference between a queen bee and a worker bee is that the queen eats Royal Jelly for the whole duration of her life, while the worker bees eat Royal Jelly for only the first three days of its larval stage. The Royal Jelly diet accounts for some rather remarkable differences in the physiology and behavior of the queen.
The queen bee is different from a normal worker bee in many ways. The queen lives forty times longer than a worker bee, up to five to seven years, and grows to be 40% larger. She can lay thousands of eggs every day. The queen has no wax glands, which the workers use to form the comb cells of the hive, and she has no pollen baskets on her legs. Her stinger is shaped differently, and while she has glands in her head (pharyngeal) region, they secrete much different substances than the workers. Worker bees are not sexually active, but the queen, as pointed out before, needs to be quite prolific to keep the hive populated.
Royal Jelly is produced by the nurse bees. Nurse bees are special worker bees that attend the queen and the babies, or larvae, of the hive. |
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| Baby Queen |
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There are also three stages in the development of a Queen Bee. But the cell of the Queen Bee is different from a normal bee. It is larger, and, in domestic bee boxes, the Queen cell hangs down perpendicularly from the entrances of the other honeycomb cells. The outside of the cell is corrugated, like a peanut.
The Queen stays in the egg stage for 3 days, like a normal bee. In fact, the egg of a Queen is identical to that of a normal bee. The difference occurs on the third day of the larval stage, when normal bees are weaned off of the Royal Jelly in their diets. |
| The Queen, in contrast is engorged on Royal Jelly for the full 5 1/2 days of her larval stage. Then, her cell is packed with Royal Jelly and sealed for the 7 1/2 days of her pupa stage. After a total of 16 days the adult Queen emerges. |
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| The Scout Bee |
A worker bee that has several specialized functions. First, the Scout Bee searches the area surrounding the hive for sources of pollen, nectar and propolis. Although the Scout may travel many miles in search of flowers, the average foraging radius is usually only a few hundred meters. When the Scout Bee finds a good source of food, she travels back to the hive and gives the foraging collector bees the information. The collectors then go out and gather the food.
When the scout bee comes back to the hive he communicates this information in the form of a Bee Dance.The dance communicates information such as the direction of the plants, the
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fragranceof the flowers, the flavor and quality of the pollen and nectar, and the quantity of the pollen and nectar available!Keep in mind that the hive is dark. The bee dancer communicates information not by by vibrations, spatial orientation, sound vibrations and samples of smell and taste. The forager bees gather around the dancer, reaching out with their antennae to gather the information from the dancing Bee. Then they rush off to go collect a load of pollen or nectar of their own.
And the miracle of this is that by this act, pollination of the flowers takes place, and the whole food chain of our planet is rejuvenated again! Without the bees we wouldn't exist, and the earth would be a lifeless, desolate place. |
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| The Collector Bees |
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Collects nectar from the flowers, which they use to make honey (of course!). Flower Nectar is produced by secretory glands in the flowers called nectaries. Flower nectar is mainly composed of water with high concentrations of sugars--mainly sucrose, glucose, and fructose. Nectar also contains small amounts of amino acids, organic acids, proteins, lipids, antioxidants, minerals and enzymes. Bees suck nectar from flowers with their long tube-shaped tongues, or proboscis. In the process, the bees will be covered with pollen, which it will spread from flower to flower as it makes its rounds. |
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A bee will visit only flowers of the same species on each round of gathering. This assures that the nectar gathered is all from a single source. It also ensures that the pollen which is spread from flower to flower pollinates the correct species.
Bees store the nectar in a cavity called the Honey Stomach. When the collector bee gets back to the hive it will mingle with the workers on the comb of the hive. The house bee will receive the nectar by extending her tongue to suck up the drops from the mouth of the gatherer. The house bee will then deposit the nectar into a open honey comb for storage. The cell will not be sealed until the nectar has evaporated enough to form thick ripe honey. The change from nectar to ripe honey takes place gradually over a period of several days. |
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| Housekeeping Bees |
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Housekeeping duties are one of the first jobs that young honeybees are assigned. Housekeeping Bees clean up used cells that have been emptied, such as brood cells in the nursery that babies bees have hatched out of and storage cells that have stored bee pollen (bee bread) or honey, which have been emptied to feed the population, Housekeeping duties are very important for the hive, because they keep the hive environment clean and sterile. |
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| The Nurse Bees are Worker Bees |
Worker Bees start out their lives as Cell-Cleaning Bees, who clean out old cells that have been used for eggs and larvae, cap cells that have been filled with Bee Pollen and Honey for storage, and generally do maintenance around the hive. This phase lasts for only the first few days of its life. Then the Workers become Nurse Bees..
There are three stages in the development of a bee. The first is the egg stage. The Queen lays an egg in the bottom of each cell. The egg is centered in the cell and one end is stuck to the bottom.
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| For a Worker Bee larvae this stage lasts three days. Worker Bee larvae are fed Royal Jelly for three days, after which they are fed Bee Pollen and Honey. Then, after six days in the larval stage, the cell is capped with wax and the bee spends the next 12 days in the pupa stage. After a total of 21 days the adult worker bee emerges! |
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| The Drone |
Worker Bees start out their lives as Cell-Cleaning Bees, who clean out old cells that have been used for eggs and larvae, cap cells that have been filled with Bee Pollen and Honey for storage, and generally do maintenance around the hive. This phase lasts for only the first few days of its life. Then the Workers become Nurse Bees..
There are three stages in the development of a bee. The first is the egg stage. The Queen lays an egg in the bottom of each cell. The egg is centered in the cell and one end is stuck to the bottom.
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| For a Worker Bee larvae this stage lasts three days. Worker Bee larvae are fed Royal Jelly for three days, after which they are fed Bee Pollen and Honey. Then, after six days in the larval stage, the cell is capped with wax and the bee spends the next 12 days in the pupa stage. After a total of 21 days the adult worker bee emerges! |
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| The Pollen Picking Collector Bee |
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After getting directions from the Scout Bee, the Collector Bee flies to the area where the flowers bloom, all full of pollen or dripping with nectar and starts gathering pollen from the flowers. As the bee works, she gathers pollen grains, mixing the pollen with a little honey from her mouth, and packs the pollen into sacks, or corbiculae, that are located on her legs. It is in this way that pollen granules are formed. When the bee returns to the hive, the pollen granules are mixed with other secretions and are stored and sealed in a cell in the hive. When the cell is opened at a later date, the cell yields tasty "bee bread", which the bees, especially the young babies, eat for food. |
| How do we get the pollen that we sell to you? Well, the beekeepers put a device called the "pollen trap" over the entrance of the hive. It consists of a series of wires mesh screens that the bees crawl through to get into the hive. The pollen trap does not hurt the bees at all, but it does knock about half of the granules out of the sacks, or corbiculae, from the bee’s legs, where they fall into a tray that the beekeeper empties periodically. |
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| The Guard Bees |
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Stationed outside the entrance of the hive and their job is to sound the alarm in times of danger, such as attacks. When the bees in the hive detect the alarm pheromones, they swarm out of the hive and attack the predators and protect the hive. |
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| The Under Taker |
Did you know that most honeybees live only 5-7 weeks? The Queen Bee is the exception, thanks to Royal Jelly - she lives 5-7 years! But because of the big turn-around in population, the Undertaker Bees job is to collect the bodies of dead bees and take them to the hive entrance, and throw them out onto the ground.
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