The Honey Bee

Each honeybee colony is made up of around 95% workers, 5% drones and 1 Queen.

Honey bees, like ants, termites and some wasps are social insects. Unlike ants and wasps, bees are vegetarians; their protein comes from pollen and their carbohydrate comes from honey which they make from nectar.

Honey Bees make combs of waxen cells placed side by side that provide spaces to rear young and to store honey. The bee colony lives on the stored honey throughout winters and therefore can subsist for years.

WORKER BEES

Worker bees are reproductively undeveloped females who live up to their name, working the hardest of all bees in the colony.

A colony may have 20,000 to 100,000 workers. The life span of a worker bee depends upon the time of year and amount of work done. It is generally accepted that an individual worker has the ability to log 800km and will collect 5ml (or one teaspoon) of honey over her life span. Depending on their age, they have many different roles in the hive.

Older bees are Foragers, collecting important resources from flowers like pollen, nectar and propolis that are essential for a strong and surviving hive.

A young females’ role is called a Nurse bee. When foraging bees return to the hive, they will pass collected nectar to a nurse bee, turning it into honey to store. Main roles include feeding larvae, filling and capping cells, feeding the queen and also feeding drones.

Many more roles are played by worker bees include:

Pollen packers: bees store pollen into cells, mixed with a little honey to produce “bee bread” that is fed to larvae.

Honeycomb builders: Using their wax glands, these workers will continue to produce beeswax so they can build the hexagon structure. Bees have been using the hexagon for centuries as it distributes forces and weight evenly across it’s sides, proving to be the strongest shape. Read more about the formation of beeswax here.

Honey sealers: before filling the honeycomb cells with honey these hive workers will break down the water content that turns nectar into honey. Each cell is then capped with wax that has been produced from their wax glans in the abdomen.

The Fanners: also know as the air conditioners! The hive needs to maintain a temperature between 33 – 36 degrees Celsius otherwise the wax foundation will get too hot and possibly collapse. Workers will fan their wings (over 200 times per second!), using evaporated water to help stay cool.

Water carriers: Water collecting bees will simply spit water into the hive towards the fanning bees. The airflow that moves by fanning over the water causes evaporation which acts as a cooling aid.

Now we know why they are named Workers!

QUEEN

A young queen will take her first nuptial flight and mate with around 15 – 20 drones, collecting millions of sperm and storing in in her spermathecal duct.

Sometimes a few mating flights are needed but once she has collected enough sperm to last her lifetime, the queen will return and remain in the hive and lay around 2,000 eggs each day.

The queen can determine the gender of her eggs when they move from her ovaries, some will be pressed against her spermathecal duct which will fertilize the egg. If an egg is fertilized, it will become female, known as Workers and an unfertilized egg will be male, know as a Drone.

As she nears the end of her life, she will lay eggs sporadically which indicates to the hive to start preparing for a new quenn.

Nurse bees can secrete a substance from their glands called, Royal Jelly. The first 1 – 3 days after being laid, eggs are fed royal jelly but after this their diet consists of “bee bread” which is made up of pollen and honey. The larvae chosen to become the next queen will continue to exclusively be fed royal jelly. This substance triggers the development of queen morphology, including the fully developed ovaries needed to lay eggs.

If several queen cells have been prepared by the hive bees, it is a race to be crowned by being the first to hatch. Once the first queen has emerged from her cell, she will sort out fellow potential queen cells and ruthlessly bite and kill them before they have had a chance to hatch. There can be only one crown!

Around 5 days after emerging from her cell, the virgin queen will take her first nuptial flight. Only once she has mated with a drone, she will then be officially crowned, Queen of her hive.

DRONES

Drones are the only male in a hive and their primary purpose is to mate with a queen. They do not gather nectar or pollen, do not produce honey and they rely on their sisters to feed them! They also have no stinger, but are known to buzz around intruders to disorient them if nests are being disturbed.

Some would say drones are lazy and a bit annoying but in fact, they are a crucial part of the colony – genetic diversity.

The queen will mate with drones from various colonies on her small number of mating flights. This broadens the genetic pool which generally has positive benefits, such as greater ability to resist disease. The greater the genetic diversity of sperm collected by the queen the greater the chance of the colony surviving.

After a drone has mated with a queen they generally won’t survive, as a similar thing happens to when a female bee stings, their organs are also ripped out when they dislodge from a queen.

Once Autumn begins, any surviving drones will be kicked out of the hive by their sisters, as they do not contribute to the hive and becomes another mouth to feed when pollen and nectar become scarce. Workers will stop feeding drones and if they have not died of starvation they will be dragged to the entrance of the hive, where they start to bite off the drones wings and legs and be thrown out to eventually die from hypothermia.

Brutal, but essential for a healthy and surviving colony through winter!