BIG COUNTRY BEEKEEPERS ASSOCIATION
WHAT IS A HONEY BEE?
A honey bee is a eusocial flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade, all native to mainland Afro-Eurasia. The honey bee was imported into North America in the early 17th century.
While about 20,000 species of bees exist, only eight species of honey bee are recognized.
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The honey bee is a major pollinator of flowers and therefore, the plants producing the flowers rely on bees. The goal of the plant is reproduction, and the bees help accomplish this by unwittingly transferring pollen, a plant’s male sperm cells, from one flower to another. Without pollination, many plants would not be able to procreate and eventually would die out.
Besides pollination, honey bees extract nectar and pollen from the flowers. The nectar is transported back to the nest where, through a process, it is converted into honey, and the pollen is used as a food source.
APPEARANCE + ANATOMY
Almost all honey bees have varying dark-to-light striations. These stripes serve a purpose for the survival of the honey bee: unlike other species that hide when they sense predators close by, the brightly colored bodies of the honey bee act as a warning to predators or honey robbers of the honey bees’ ability to sting.
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The body of the honey bee is segmented: stinger, legs, antenna, three segments of thorax and six visible segments of abdomen.
The head of the honey bee consists of the eyes, antennae and feeding structures. The eyes include the compound eye and the simple eye: the compound eye helps bees understand color, light and directional information from the sun’s UV rays, while the function of the simple eye, also called ocelli, helps in determining the amount of light present. The antennas’ function is to smell and detect odors and to measure flight speed. The mandible is the bee’s jaw, which is used in eating pollen, cutting and shaping wax, feeding larvae and the queen, cleaning the hive, grooming and fighting.
The thorax of the bee consists of the wings, legs and the muscles that control their movement. The forewing, which is typically larger than the hind wing, is used for flight and as a cooling mechanism, while the latter is used to fan away heat and cool the hive.
Lastly, the abdomen’s six segments include female reproductive organs in the queen, male reproductive organs in the drone and the stinger in both workers and queen.
THE HONEY BEE COLONY
Honey bees are social and live in colonies numbering in the thousands. Three types of adult honey bees reside in one colony: workers, drones and a queen.
Honey bee colonies are known as superorganisms.
In 1911, the American entomologist William Morton Wheeler coined the term superorganisms in reference to honey bee colonies upon realising all of the members of the colony work cooperatively and rely on each sector of the hive, in order for the colony to survive.
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In each colony, there is only one egg-laying queen, but there are thousands of workers.
A queen bee has two essential functions; she produces pheromones that serve as a social “glue” unifying and helping to give individual identity to a bee colony, and she lays eggs.
A virgin queen will mate with drones, after a series of orientation flights within 1-14 days of emerging from her cell. By mating during flight, a queen bee is able to increase the odds that she will mate with drones that did not originate from her own colony, and thereby minimize the chances of inbreeding appearing in the next generation.
The now fertile queen stores enough seed inside her spermatheca to produce fertilized eggs for the rest of her life, of up to 5 years. As she grows older, her laying will weaken, and she will eventually be replaced by a new queen.
The queen lays eggs in the cells of the wax comb previously made by worker bees, and is capable of producing 1,500 eggs a day.
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Female worker bees have specialized structures, such as brood food glands, scent glands, wax glands, and pollen baskets, which allow them to perform all the labors of the hive. They clean and polish the cells, feed the brood, care for the queen, remove debris, handle incoming nectar, build beeswax combs, guard the entrance, and air-condition and ventilate the hive during their initial few weeks as adults. Later as field bees they forage for nectar, pollen, water, and propolis (plant sap).
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Drones, or male bees, are the minority in a colony and serve one major purpose: to mate with virgin queens, which they can only do one time. Although drones perform no specific work for the hive, their presence is essential for normal colony functioning; they contribute to thermoregulation of the nest, and produce a pheromone that attracts other drones flying in close range. This leads to the formation of the drone congregation area, in preparation for a virgin queen to fly through.
When cold weather begins in the fall and pollen/nectar resources become scarce, drones are usually forced out of the hive, and will not survive. Queenless colonies, however, allow them to stay in the hive indefinitely.
HONEY BEE NAVIGATION
Researchers have known for a century that honeybees are exceptional navigators. They can find their way around using their sense of smell, the sun, the pattern of polarized light in the sky, vertical landmarks that stand out in the view, and maybe even the Earth’s magnetic field.
They are also smart learners who can make connections between different memories to figure out rules.
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A recent study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience has demonstrated that honeybees, like early pilots, rely on the dominant linear landscape features to navigate and find their way back home. This finding suggests that bees use similar strategies as humans when it comes to orientation and spatial navigation.
Read the full article: HERE
FURTHER READING
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