Digger Bees

Digger Bees Digger Bees

Digger Bees


Of the dozens of varieties of bees, digger bees are among the more interesting. Like honey bees and bumblebees, digger bees are members of the Apidae family; however, they are solitary rather than social bees. In this regard they have more in common with carpenter bees — yet another variety of the Apidae family. There are more than 750 distinct species of digger bees worldwide; all of these species are solitary.

Digger bees are large — up to 3 centimeters in length. They are robust, fast flying, and hairy, their fur almost velvety, with visibly protruding faces. Their abdomens are often banded, the bands colored a metallic blue. When digger bees fly, their wings appear disproportionately short in comparison with their large bodies; because of these short wings, the buzzing sound they make when flying is more of a high-pitched whine.

As their name suggests, digger bees build their nests in the ground, digging tunnels in the soil. They are fairly choosy about their nesting sites; the soil must display optimal slope, aspect, density, and drainage. Sandy, well-drained soils on south-facing banks are best, especially if there is some protective cover such as low-lying vegetation. Wild blueberry fields are a favorite of digger bees. Because such optimal sites can be hard to find, hundreds of digger bees, all operating individually, may construct their nests in close proximity to each other. These dense aggregations of individual nests give the appearance of a colony, and perhaps the bees find comfort being among others of their own kind.

Nests are constructed by female digger bees, primarily for the purpose of laying eggs and raising young. A digger bee nest consists of a central shaft that extends from a few inches to as deep as 18 inches below the ground, with a series of individual dug-out cells protruding laterally from the shaft. One species of digger bee — the Pacific sand dune bee — digs nests in coastal sand dunes in California, Oregon, and Washington that can be nearly a meter deep. Other species will use the excavated soil to construct a characteristic turret above ground, marking the entrance to the nest as a sort of chimney-like extension of the entrance. If the soil is dry, the bee may forage for water, carrying water back to make excavation easier. The bee will line each individual cell with a wax-like, waterproof secretion. When the nest is complete, the bees will collect pollen and nectar from flowers; they bring these nutrient-rich food sources back to their nests and pack it into the cells. They will then lay their eggs in the nutrient-packed cells.

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Digger Bees Image Digger Bees

Male digger bees, meanwhile, lead separate lives. They will hover around nesting areas, waiting for females to emerge from their nests so that they can mate. Sometimes males will dig their own small holes in the vicinity; often there is competition among male bees for prime locations, with the larger-sized males winning out. At night, male digger bees will sometimes congregate and rest in nearby shrubbery, or they will retire to their own nests.

Mating occurs in the late spring and egg-laying in summer; the resulting bee larvae reside in their secure underground cells, nurtured by their mother, through the fall and winter. The larvae are sustained through this long period by the nectar and pollen collected by the mother bee throughout the earlier summer months. In the late spring, the newly adult bees will emerge from their nests, males and females, and begin the mating cycle again.

Digger bees forage for nectar and pollen from among a wide variety of plants, including all kinds of berries, currants, maple, dandelion, rose, sumac, clover, and more. Some species of digger bees are particularly important in the pollination of wild blueberry, particularly if they are nesting in a blueberry field.

Stepping into a blueberry field filled with loudly active digger bees may be intimidating at first, but these bees are very nonaggressive, and they won�t sting unless handled or trapped in clothing. And even their stings are milder than honey bee stings. As with most bees, males don�t sting at all. Digger bees in fact are at some risk in their nesting areas; several parasites, such as velvet ants and blister beetles, may try to invade their nests.

If you encounter a collection of digger bee nests in an area where you don�t want them, the easiest way to get rid of them is to change the surface of the nesting area, for instance by adding mulch or by watering the ground. The bees will then move to another location. Control by insecticide is difficult, as each individual nest would need to be treated singly, and there may be hundreds of individual nests.

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Worker Bees

Worker Bees Worker Bees

Worker Bees


Worker Bee Middle Worker Bees

Honey bee colonies are remarkable for their division of labor among different bee types within each hive. The queen bee — of which there is usually only one, even in a hive with 50,000 bees — is the hive�s only fertile female; she mates, and then lays eggs. Drones are male bees whose only purpose is to mate with the queen. Drones do no other work, and they mate only once before dying; if they don�t mate before the beginning of the cold season, they are expelled from the hive. A colony will have only a few thousand drones, and often fewer than 1,000.

Most honey bees are worker bees. These bees are sterile females, and they do all the work of the hive, including tending to the brood, collecting food, feeding and protecting the queen, building cells, and defending the hive.

Worker bees develop from eggs laid by the queen in specially prepared brood cells in a waxen honeycomb made of hexagonal cells. After three days, an egg hatches into a larvae, which is fed by nurse bees — worker bees assigned this special function. These worker bee larvae are first fed royal jelly, a nutritional secretion, and then honey and pollen. (Bee larvae destined to become virgin queens, who will compete with one another to become a new queen if the hive�s current queen no longer produces sufficient eggs, continue to be fed royal jelly.)

The larva is fed for about six days, after which it becomes an inactive pupa. At this point, the cell is capped with beeswax, during which the pupa develops into a worker bee. The fully formed bee emerges on the 20th day, at which point it is able to feed itself, first from stored-up food in the hive and then from flowers and plant life outside of the hive.

bee001 Worker Bees Worker Bees
Worker Bees Top Worker Bees

Worker bees generally follow a succession of tasks through their short lives. During the first few days after emerging from a brood cell, the worker will clean cells and prepare them for new eggs from the queen. The queen will inspect a brood cell before laying an egg in one; if the cell is unsatisfactory, she will not use the cell, and a worker bee will have to clean it more thoroughly. Young workers also function as nurse bees, feeding royal jelly to young larvae and honey and pollen to more mature larvae.

Young bees are also involved in wax production. Wax is secreted from wax glands, located inside the last four ventral sections of the abdomen, and is used to build honeycombs, either for storage of honey or for use as brood cells. New wax is also needed to repair old cells, and to cap cells (honeycombs as well as brood cells). These �wax bees� are also involved in collecting nectar and pollen brought into the hive by foraging bees and storing the honey in honeycombs.

Worker bees in middle age — three to four weeks old — function as guard bees. Entrance guard bees stay at the entry point to the hive, ensuring that all bees attempting to enter the hive in fact belong to that hive; the bees can tell by the odor. Returning bees will generally be forager bees, bringing nectar and pollen back to the hive. Any outsiders trying to gain entry to the hive will be driven off by these guard bees, in conjunction with soldier bees, who also hover near the entrance. Other guards make reconnaissance flights outside the hive and attempt to drive off larger intruders by swarming and stinging.

A worker bee�s golden years — the last few weeks of her life — are spent foraging for honey and pollen. Forager bees suck nectar from flowers using a long proboscis and stow the nectar in a special sac called a �honey stomach,� where the nectar mixes with enzymes; when a forager returns to the hive, she regurgitates this nectar, and another bee will transfer it to a honeycomb where it is evaporated into honey. Simultaneously, worker bees collect pollen in pollen sacs on their rear legs; this is also brought back to the hive to be used as food, but in the process of collecting nectar and pollen, bees inadvertently transfer pollen from flower to flower. This process of pollination is a critical step in food cycles around the world; a substantial percentage of plant propagation worldwide depends on pollination by bees.

Worker bees carry out many other tasks. They feed drone bees and attend to the queen, grooming and feeding her. They produce honey — storing nectar in honeycomb cells and fanning their wings until the nectar thickens into honey — and pack pollen into special comb cells, where it is mixed with honey to prevent spoilage. They remove dead bees and undeveloped larvae from the hive and dispose of the corpses some distance from the hive. They control the temperature of the hive, clustering together to generate body heat in the colder months and bringing water to the hive in hot months, fanning their wings to cool down the hive by evaporation.

And worker bees can lay eggs. The eggs are unfertilized — all worker bees are sterile — but, through a process known as parthenogenesis (a form of asexual reproduction), these eggs can develop into embryos without needing to be fertilized by a male. Unfertilized eggs, if nurtured, will develop into drone bee larvae. Among some species of honey bees, and particularly among bumblebees, drones are often propagated through this process. Among other species of honey bee, drones usually come from eggs hatched by the queen, and any eggs that happen to be laid by worker bees are destroyed.

Worker bees live a short life — only four or five weeks. If a worker bee happens to be born during the winter, a �down time� for the hive, when most of the bees remain inside the hive living off stored-up food reserves — worker bees may live for several months. In either case, their numbered days are filled with activity.

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The Drone Bee

The Drone Bee The Drone Bee

The Drone Bee


 

 

Honey bee colonies are complex social structures; different types of bees in each colony play different roles, all with the purpose of sustaining the overall hive. Most bees are worker bees, sterile females who do nearly all the work of the hive. Hives also have a queen bee who can live up to five years and is responsible for laying eggs; a healthy queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day.

Then there are drones — male bees, whose only purpose is to mate with the queen. A colony of 50,000 bees may have only a few thousand drones, even as few as 300. The word “drone” comes from the Old English and has always meant “male bee”; eventually, the word came to have the figurative sense of a “lazy worker” or “idler.” This second meaning of the word is appropriate, given that drone bees perform such a limited function in the hive. And these days, the word “drone” is most often used to refer to a pilotless aircraft, usually with military applications. In this case, the borrowing of the word probably refers to the deep, continuous humming sound of the drone bee rather than the bee’s lack of work to do. Drone aircraft, particularly in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan, are busy indeed.

Drone bees are larger than workers, with stouter abdomens, though they are not as large as the queen, who has an extended abdomen. A drone’s eyes are also twice as large as a worker’s or queen’s. Because mating occurs in flight, the drone needs good vision to ensure successful performance, and he also must be able to fly relatively rapidly.

The queen lays fertilized eggs, most of which develop into female larvae and eventually worker bees but some of which develop into male larvae. Among some species of honey bee (and among many kinds of bumblebees), however, it is the sterile worker bees who lay unfertilized eggs that develop into drones. This process is called parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction in which the laying of eggs, and the growth and development of subsequent embryos, occurs without requiring fertilization by a male. This form of reproduction, in one variation or another, is common among various invertebrates.

bee001 The Drone Bee The Drone Bee
Drone Bee The Drone Bee

Eggs destined to become male drone larvae — whether fertilized eggs laid by the queen or unfertilized eggs laid by worker bees — are laid in what are called drone cells in the hive; these cells are slightly wider than normal brood cells. Worker bees fill the cells with a mixture of worker jelly, pollen, and honey, as food for the young drone larvae; the drone cells are then capped with beeswax as the larvae develop. It’s easy to distinguish a capped drone cell from a capped worker cell, as the caps of the former bulge out. Once a young drone emerges from his cell, he will live in the hive for about a week, feeding on food stores available within the hive, and then, depending on the time of year, he will begin leaving the hive and finding food sources on his own.

Whether he is inside the hive or finding his own meals outside the hive, the drone does no work whatsoever. He does not help the workers nurture larvae, build combs, or cure honey; when finding food in plant life outside, he does not bring any nectar or pollen back to the hive for storage. In fact, he does little more than eat. His ‘stinger’ does not function and he carries no venom; a drone is unable to defend the hive. If he is handled by a human, a drone may make a pathetic attempt to frighten his tormentor by swinging his tail around. And if the hive is disturbed, drones may join workers in buzzing around the intruder in an attempt to disorient and frighten the intruder off, but he cannot inflict stings as the workers can.

Drones exist exclusively for the purpose of fertilizing a receptive queen. As young drones begin leaving the hive in search of food, they tend to congregate in areas near the hive, in an almost human behavioral pattern. Meanwhile, virgin queens from various hives in the vicinity will make mating flights in the vicinity; the drones pursue them and mate in mid-flight. Usually, a drone will end up mating with a virgin queen from a different colony, and each virgin queen will mate with several drones; this mating pattern ensures good genetic mixing among honey bee populations.

A drone can mate only one time, and once he successfully mates, he dies. His sexual organ is barbed, and after mating is ripped from his abdomen. He then plummets to the ground in a death spiral, while the mating queen goes off in search of other partners. Drones who fail to mate fare no better; because they are useless to the hive and a drain on the hive’s stored-up resources, worker bees expel all remaining drones at the beginning of the cold season, when mating is over for the year. Because there is no food to be found from flowers or other plant life in the late autumn and winter, these expelled drones will starve to death. The life expectancy of a drone bee is about 90 days.

Drones face other perils as well. Varroa mites are a common parasite in hives, and an infestation of these mites, which carry deadly viruses, can destroy a hive. These mites propagate within brood cells, infecting bee larvae with viruses, and they prefer drone cells because drones undergo a longer development period than worker bee larvae. The mites, therefore, have a longer time period to ensure their own propagation.

Honey bee drones perform an extremely limited role in the overall life of the hive, but obviously a critical one.

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Honey Bees and Bears

Honey Bees and Bears Honey Bees and Bears

Honey Bees and Bears


One of the most widespread clich’s regarding animal behavior is that bears like to eat honey. A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh with his snout buried in a pot of honey is an indelible image that millions of children around the world carry from their childhood. But the fact is, bears are indeed attracted by honey, and if you live in a bear habitat and keep bees, your hives are at risk of destruction.

Bears of all sorts have the equivalent of a sweet tooth; they like foods rich in sugar. Sugar packs a lot of energy in small quantities, and bears need energy in spades to forage for other foods throughout the day. Also, bears hibernate for three months during the winter; they need to fatten themselves up so they don’t starve during their hibernation period. So bears that develop a particular taste for honey, and who are able to find honey, have an advantage: they are more likely to survive during the winters, and to raise young cubs.

Bears will raid both wild beehives as well as domestic hives. They are not mannerly eaters; they will tear a hive to pieces and consume all the honey they can get their paws on, regardless of the needs of the bees themselves. Bees will of course try to defend their hive, but their stings cannot penetrate a bear’s thick coat. Bears, of course, need other food too — berries, roots, bark, and fish all make up a rounded ursine diet. But an unprotected bee farm can keep a bear occupied for a long time.

Bears are active both day and night, especially in the months and weeks approaching their hibernation period (in the fall); in areas populated by humans, however, bears tend to operate mostly at night, knowing that people can pose a danger to them. In any event, bears are cautious and you are unlikely to catch one in the act of consuming your hives. If you do, there’s not much you can do about it. Depending on your jurisdiction and the exact circumstances, it may be legal to shoot the bear; if the bear poses a mortal threat to you, your family, or your pets, you could probably shoot the bear without legal consequences. However, if you keep bees and are prepared to shoot a hungry bear who might stray among your hives, you should be aware of local ordinances.

bee001 Honey Bees and Bears Bear eating Bee Hive at Laural Falls
Honey Bees and Bears Content Honey Bees and Bears

Don’t try to chase the bear away. Bears are indeed shy and afraid of people, but a hungry bear intent on eating her fill may not be so shy. And if a bear cub is in the vicinity, don’t even think about going anywhere near the bear; a bear will do anything protect her young, and even the most innocent of moves on your part will be perceived as a threat.

You should prepare beforehand by installing electric fencing around your beehives. A solar-charged electric fence, with alternating hot and ground wires placed 6 inches apart up to 3 feet in height, should do the trick. The solar unit can be positioned among your hives, deep within the fenced-in area. The energizer and battery can be placed inside a ‘dummy’ hive, to protect against theft. The hives themselves should be at least 3 feet inside the perimeter of the fence. To ‘train’ bears in your area to respect the fence, you can lure them by hanging strips of bacon on the hot wires. They’ll get shocked when they try to grab the bacon, and will soon learn to stay back.

There are various ways to lay out, install, and charge an electric fence. Check with your local Fish and Game office about any ordinances regarding electric fences. If you are a commercial beekeeper or an advanced hobbyist, your Fish and Game office may be authorized to offer assistance in fence installation, but will rely on you to maintain the fence once installed.

And your apiary should not be positioned in an area that might be potentially attractive to bears. Avoid major bear travel corridors such as riverbeds, and keep your hives away from trash dumps, animal carcass disposal sites, berry fields or other food sources, or streams running with fish. If possible, keep your hives in open areas, at least 100 meters from a forest grove or ravine. When you install your fence, don’t position any fencing under branches, as these may fall onto your fence during a heavy rain.

Many U.S. states and municipalities, and jurisdictions in other countries, list honey as a crop, and therefore eligible for damage protection and reimbursement. However, to qualify for assistance or reimbursement, the beekeeper must take all reasonable precautions against bear predation and the resultant damage.

If there’s a specific bear that’s causing problems for many local beekeepers and other farmers and residents, your Fish and Game office or some other municipal agency may decide to trap the bear and remove it. Relocating bears in this manner is expensive for the community and sometimes doesn’t work; the bear might find his way back to his original area and cause further damage. As a last resort, the bear might be destroyed.

If you take proper precautions, you can profitably raise bees in a bear habitat. You just have to teach the bears to stay away from your hives; they’ll have to look elsewhere for their food.

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Killer Bees

KillerBees Killer Bees

Killer Bees


 

Several years ago, there was a great deal of publicity about so-called “killer bees,” especially as swarms of these aggressive bees continued their migrations northward through Central America and into the southern United States. As a result of hastily spread misconceptions, and some bad Hollywood productions, an overall climate of fear was generated; some people even began to see normal honey bees as possible agents of mayhem and destruction. However, as the anticipated catastrophe never materialized, stories about killer bees returned to the back pages of newspapers, and little is heard about them anymore.
Killer bees are still with us and they continue to migrate, but they have not significantly disrupted existing bee populations or caused other major hazards. A “killer bee” is an Africanized honey bee: a hybrid of African honey bees and various European bees. These bees were first introduced into the wild in the Americas in Brazil, in 1957, by accident. A beekeeper in Minas Gerais State, Brazil, was attempting to interbreed various strains of honey bees from Europe and southern Africa, to create a strain that would be suitable to tropical climates. Several Africanized queen and drone bees were accidentally released, however; they began to interbreed with local Brazilian bees, and have been spreading ever since.
bee001 Killer Bees Killer Bees
Killer Bees Content Killer Bees
Although the Africanized hybrids are more productive than bees native to the Americas, they also exhibit character traits from their African ancestors that are less beneficial. Bees in Africa have developed more aggressive traits, as they have had to defend themselves against a wider range of predatory insects, honey badgers, and humans, who in Africa have tended not to harvest honey from domestic hives but to steal honey from wild hives, destroying the colonies in the process. The colonies most likely to survive these threats have been the fiercest ones, and thus ferocity has been a naturally selected characteristic of African honey bees.
Africanized bees are more defensive of their hives, and they are more likely to attack a perceived threat. They attack relentlessly in large numbers, pursuing victims up to a quarter mile away from their hive, and they remain agitated for longer periods of time. Because of their aggressive behavior, Africanized bees can indeed be dangerous, particularly to people who are allergic to bees. However, a sting from an Africanized bee is no more potent than a sting from any other honey bee; the danger is, you are more likely to be stung. A victim of an Africanized bee attack may receive ten times as many stings as he or she would from an attack by European bees, and at least 1,000 people have been killed by Africanized bees in the Americas since they were first introduced here.

The biggest danger of Africanized bees is to existing colonies of Western honey bees. Migrating Africanized bees tend to take over existing bee colonies, invading hives and killing the existing queen. This creates hazards for beekeepers, who depend on the reliability and stability of their colonies to produce honey and other bee byproducts. Some beekeepers in Mexico have learned to breed their European queens with wild African drones, producing generations of worker bees that are more manageable and “tame” than wild Africanized bees. In this way, it is possible to domesticate the Africanized bees.
Africanized bees continue to spread throughout the United States. In 2002, the bees had spread through much of Texas and into New Mexico, Arizona, and southern California. Five years later, they had begun to migrate east of Texas, into Arkansas and Louisiana. And in October 2010, a 73-year-old man was stung to death by a swarm of Africanized bees in southern Georgia, the first reports of these bees in that state. However, because Africanized bees were originally bred for tropical climates, they only compete effectively with European bees in warmer climates. As they migrate further north, they interbreed more often with European bees, and bee populations in some regions have begun to stabilize, either dominated by Africanized bees or European bees or hosting a mixture of the two strains.
Nevertheless, there is still uncertainty with regard to further migrations of the Africanized bees, or whether they will be able to adapt to colder climates.

What should you do if you are attacked by a swarm of Africanized bees? You may be able to outrun them; they are slower than European bees. Don’t run toward other people, as you will subject them to attack as well. And don’t try to escape the bees by plunging into a river or lake; they will swarm overhead and wait for you to surface. If you are allergic to bee stings and you are stung, get to a hospital quickly. Even if you are not allergic, repeated stings can be dangerous.

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Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers

DoBeesPreferCertainFlowers Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers

Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers?


 

All bees — including honey bees, bumblebees, and carpenter bees — feed on the nectar of flowers, and collect pollen from flowers to feed their larvae. In the process, bees play a crucial role in the pollination of plant life around the world.
Bees have a long proboscis — a complex tongue — which they use to obtain nectar from flowers; the nectar provides a source of energy. Depending on need, bees also deliberately collect pollen, a source of nutrients for their young. However, pollen often sticks to hairs on the bees’ bodies, and as the bees move from flower to flower, the pollen from one flower rubs off on another, thus causing pollination. Although this is an accidental process, pollination effected by bees is responsible for as much as 30 percent of global food supplies.
Given that there are thousands of varieties of flowers in gardens around the world, do bees prefer some flowers over others? There are many variables that affect why a bee will gravitate toward one flower rather than another. First is color: bees see ultraviolet colors that we can’t see, and the UV colors and patterns in a flower’s petals announce that flower as a good source of nectar and pollen. Typically, flowers with prominent UV colors are yellow to our eyes; wild hydrangea and sunflowers amplify their color signals, and are attractive to bees. Blue flowers are also attractive to bees. At the other end of the visible spectrum, bees do not detect red; instead, they see only black. Red flowers thus must depend on other animals, such as hummingbirds or butterflies, for pollination.
bee001 Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers?
Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers Content Do Bees Prefer Certain Flowers
Bees are also attracted by delicate, sweet scents, which they are able to detect.
Shape is one other quality that can attract a bee. Open, bowl-shaped flowers such as roses, or tubular flowers such as foxgloves, snapdragons, penstemons, and heathers, all allow for easy landing and take-off. Bowl-shaped flowers that face the sun are particularly attractive, as they provide warmth as well. The single-flowered rose family, including crab apples, hawthorn, and potentilla, are attractive to bees.
Spring flowers that are most likely to attract bees include bluebells, bugles, hawthorn, crab apples, forget-me-nots, daffodils, flowering cherry and currant, hawthorn, rosemary, pussy willow, and rhododendron. In the early summer, try geraniums, foxgloves, aquilegia, snapdragons, potentilla, astilbe, campanula, comfrey, fennel, everlasting sweet pea, fennel, thyme, and verbascum. Late summer possibilities would include aster, angelica, cardoon, cornflower, single-flowered dahlia, delphinium, eryngium, fuchsia, ivy, globe thistle, lavender, heather, penstemon, scabious, and sedum.

It is easy to create a garden that is attractive to bees, if you select the right kinds of flowers.

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Honey Bees vs Bumblebees

HoneyBeesvsBumblebees Honey Bees vs Bumblebees

Honey Bees VS Bumblebees


 

 

Honey bees are among the most useful creatures on earth; not only do they provide us with honey and other byproducts that we can consume as food, but honey bees and other bees play a crucial role in the pollination of plant life. It has been estimated that up to 30 percent of the food that humans consume around the world is reliant upon pollination by bees. However, we are just as likely to find bumblebees in our gardens as honey bees; how do these two types of bees differ?
Both honey bees and bumblebees are members of the family Apidae; honey bees belong to the genus Apis and bumblebees to the genus Bombus. Although there are more than 250 known species of bumblebee, there are only 7 recognized species of honey bee. Both play a role in the pollination of plant life. Both are social animals, living in colonies, and thus worker bees gather nectar from flowers to take back to their colonies, for consumption and to feed to their young.
honeybees Honey Bees vs Bumblebees
Honey Bees

bumblebees Honey Bees vs Bumblebees
Bumblebees

Beekeepers raise honey bees for honey, beeswax, and other commercial products; bee colonies kept by beekeepers can last many years, and honey bees in the wild also tend to establish permanent homes. Typical honey bee colonies have 30,000 to 50,000 bees, whether domesticated or in the wild; the vast majority of the bees in a colony are female worker bees, who are sterile and perform nearly all the work of the colony. Colonies also contain a queen, who is capable of laying eggs and producing young; and a few hundred male drones, whose only function is to mate with the queen.
Bumblebees, on the other hand, have much smaller colonies — sometimes fewer than a hundred bees. Bumblebees do not construct permanent homes as honeybees do; they often nest in tunnels in the ground, though sometimes they will manufacture a wax canopy for protection. Bumblebee societies are structured similarly to those of honey bees, with workers, drones, and a queen all fulfilling specific functions, but bumblebee workers are not sterile; they are able to lay haploid eggs that develop into male drones. Only queens are able to lay diploid eggs that can mature into female workers and queens as well as males.
This reproductive competition between the queen and the workers results in colony behavior that differs from that of honey bees. Early in the reproductive season, the queen will suppress the egg-laying ability of her workers by physical aggression as well as pheromonal signals. The queen will thus produce all the first male larvae of that season, as well as all the female larvae. As the queen’s ability to suppress the workers wanes later in the season, worker bees, too, will begin to lay eggs that produce male larvae.
After they have matured, new males and queens will be driven from the colony; these outcasts spend nights on flowers or in cavities in the ground. The queens and drones will also mate with each other; a mated queen will search for a suitable location to hibernate through the winter. The following spring, the queen will emerge from hibernation and find a location for a nest. The queen, then, forms a new colony and broods her eggs on her own.
Bumblebees do produce honey, from the nectar they gather from flowers; the process is similar to that of honey bees. However, honey bees tend to produce more honey than they need; it is thus easy for beekeepers to harvest honey from domestic hives while leaving enough for the honey bees’ own needs. Because bumblebee colonies are so much smaller, they are barely able to produce enough honey for themselves; beekeepers therefore do not attempt to raise bumblebees for their honey. Additionally, it is difficult and usually destructive to extract honey from wild bumblebee nests. Bumblebee honey is perfectly edible, but thinner and more watery than honey bee honey.
It sometimes may be hard to distinguish between a honey bee and a bumblebee, but they are distinct animals with different habits and life cycles.

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The Queen Bee

the queen bee The Queen Bee

The Queen Bee


Most of us, at some point in our lives, have learned something about the function of beehives, and the division of bees into workers, drones, and the queen. Because the roles of these three types of bees are so precisely defined, we can almost look at a hive as a single living organism, with each component — the individual bees — functioning exclusively for the survival of the whole.
Worker bees are female, and, as suggested by their designation, they do all the work: building and cleaning the hive, feeding the brood, guarding the hive, and collecting pollen and nectar. During winter months, worker bees even generate heat within the hive by flexing their flight muscles. The male drone bees, on the other hand, do no work whatsoever; their only purpose is to mate with the queen. This so-called “division of labor” may draw comment from female humans. Once a drone manages to mate with the queen, he dies; and during the cold season, any drones who haven’t mated, being a drain on the hive’s resources, are attacked and killed by the workers.
What, then, does the queen bee do? Generally, there is only one mated queen bee in the hive, and she is the mother of most, if not all, of the bees in the hive. The queen does not control the activity of the hive, which proceeds relentlessly on its own; her only function is reproduction, and a well-fed queen can lay as many as 2,000 eggs per day during the springtime. This prodigious daily output in eggs is more in weight than the queen’s own body weight. While she is productive, the queen is continuously surrounded by worker bees who feed her and dispose of her waste.
The abdomens of queen bees are noticeably longer than those of worker bees, but it is still often difficult for beekeepers to find queen bees in their hives, particularly in large hives filled with 60,000 swarming bees. Sometimes, beekeepers will mark queen bees by lightly daubing paint on their thoraxes, making them easier to find when necessary. The paint does no harm to the bee.
TheQueenBee The Queen Bee
The Queen Bee

Queen bees develop from fertilized eggs, like other bees in the hive. However, a queen-to-be is fed royal jelly, a secretion rich in protein that discharges from the heads of young worker bees. Bees that are not fed this special potion develop into ordinary worker bees. The royal jelly triggers a female larva to develop into a sexually mature female.
This process, of a new queen replacing the old, is called “supersedure.” The process may be brought on by the aging of the older queen, or by the old queen falling ill. In either case, the old queen’s pheromone output decreases. If the old queen loses her ability to produce eggs and a new virgin queen has emerged, worker bees may assassinate the reigning queen by suffocating her — clustering tightly around her until she dies from overheating. This method of killing is called “balling” or, colloquially, “cuddle death.” Alternately, a newly mated queen may take on this task by herself, finishing off the old queen on her own by stinging her.
If a queen dies suddenly and there are no virgins ready to step in, the worker bees will flood cells in the hive containing larvae with royal jelly, in an effort to force-develop new virgin queens. These “emergency queens” tend to be smaller and less prolific than normally developed queens, and thus are not favored by beekeepers.
The mating process follows its own pattern. The surviving virgin bee will fly out of the hive to an area where the hive’s drones congregate; there, she will mate with a dozen or more drones. She may return to this area on several consecutive days, depending on the weather and other factors. As among other species, the warm days of springtime hold their own special magic. The mating process itself occurs in mid-flight. The young queen, now a fully mated queen, will store the collected sperm from her multiple partners in her own body, and will gradually release this sperm for the remainder of her life — from two to seven years — in the process of fertilizing her eggs.

The activities of a typical beehive are astonishing in their complexity and level of development.

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