Bee Knowledge

The Hive:

You see, most hives are well-enclosed for protection from the harsh environment. Commercial hives are kept in cozy wood boxes. Wild hives are generally found in tree trunks, stumps or some other protected place.

Bees are very familiar with their hive and do quite well in the dark. They communicate by smell, vibrations, physical interaction with the other bees, and, probably most important: pheromones. Pheromones are chemicals that bees give off to signal other bees. For instance, there are alarm pheromones that signal danger, and the Queen gives off Queen pheromones that signal the nurse bees to attend her. They also let all the other bees of the hive know that their Queen is well and ready to lead.

The Queen:

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. She may live several years, but worker bees live only a few weeks to 50 days. 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.

One of the most important functions of the queen is to enforce the social order of the hive. She does this by her very presence! "Queen Substance" is a pheromone that the queen secretes to let the member bees know that all is well in the hive. Pheromones are chemical substances secreted by the body that like members of the same species recognize and respond to. Bees in a colony "share" the queen's pheromones among themselves, and thus recognize fellow members, as well as identify intruders. The absence of a queen causes obvious "distress" among bees of the colony. These bees act much differently than bees in a hive with an active queen.

Why Is The Queen So Special?

Well simply put it's the "Royal Jelly" Biologists interested in nutrition point to the queen as an example of how diet can make an 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 or six 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.

Meet The Nurse Bee:

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. Nurse Bees attend the Queen, feeding her Royal Jelly, Bee Pollen and Honey. They clean and lick the Queen and fulfill her every need. Nurse Bees also attend to the baby larvae, feeding them and capping their cells when it is time to pupate. Nurse Bees only secrete Royal Jelly for the first few weeks of their lives.

The Bee Babies:

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. For a Worker Bee larvae this stage lasts three days. When the larvae emerge from the eggs she is fed Royal Jelly secreted from glands under the head of the Nurse Bee. 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 pupal stage. After a total of 21 days the adult worker bee emerges!

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 pupal stage. After a total of 16 days the adult Queen emerges.

Pity The Poor Drone!

It may come as a surprise to you, but most of the bees in the beehive are females! The Queen is the one sexually active female of the hive, and the workers, who comprise most of the population, are all sexually inactive females. Males do exist, though in small numbers. They are called Drones.

Drones, unlike worker bees, are pretty unproductive. They don't have stingers, so they cannot provide defense for the hive. They have no work duties; in fact, their only activity is to mate with the virgin Queen. Fifteen days after a new Queen is born she takes off on a mating flight. The drones are waiting in the air above the hive, and they mate, one after another with the Queen. The Queen, then stores the spermatazoa in a receptacle in her body for the rest of her life. It is a bitter-sweet moment for the Drone, however, for he loses his life in the process of mating. Yet, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, because if the drone lives into the fall season, when he isn't needed, then he is unceremoniously cast out of the hive where he will starve to death.

And so, that is the sad story of the Drone bee, whose sole purpose in life is (similar to other species of animals that we won't mention) to strive for one brief shining moment, basking in the light of the irresistable female...one bitter-sweet shining moment.

The Scout Bee:

The Scout Bee is 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. Five to thirty five percent of the foragers serve as Scouts Bees, depending on the conditions.

Another responsibility of the Scouts comes when the population of the hive grows too big in size to house everybody in the hive. At that time, another Queen Bee is hatched, and half of the hive follows her to a new location, where a new hive is constructed. The Scout Bees are responsible for finding a suitable location to build their new home. One of the great mysteries of nature is: how does the Scout Bee communicate the information that is so valuable to the survival of the hive?

The Bee Dance:

When the scout bee comes back to the hive he is anxious to share his find with the rest of the bees. The method that a bee communicates information is quite remarkable. He does so in the form of a Bee Dance. The dance communicates information such as the direction of the plants which yield the pollen or nectar. It also tells about the distance that the source is away from the hive. The bee also communicates the fragrance of 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 visual spectacle, but 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.

The Pollen Workers:

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. The Collector Bee then starts gathering pollen from the flowers. During this trip the Collector Bee will visit only the same type of flowers until she is done. She carries pollen from flower to flower of the same species and, thus, helps pollinate them with their own seed. During her next trip she may visit flowers from a completely different species, but she will again keep to the same type of 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 bees legs, where they fall into a tray that the beekeeper empties periodically. Collecting bee pollen is actually beneficial to the hive, because bees over-collect pollen, which results in increased population. This leads to swarming--a phenomenon that happens when new queen eggs are laid and the population of the hive splits in two. One half of the bees stay with the new queen larvae and the other half swarm with the old queen to a new location. In the old hive the new queens hatch, fight to the death, and the survivor becomes the new queen to mate and begin ruling.

The Nectar Workers:

The Collector Bees also collect 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. 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. If the nectar source is abundant and of high quality, she will be excited and dance to communicate the location of the good fortune. The bee will then walk around until she finds a house bee, to whom she will regurgitate the nectar and offer the nectar to the house bee from her mouth. 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. Meanwhile, the gatherer will clean herself off, eat some honey for energy, and be off for another round of gathering.

The Guards:

Guard Bees are stationed outside the entrance of the hive and their job is to sound the alarm in times of danger, such as attacks from marauding predators such as bears, mice, skunks and squirrels. The Guard bees sound the alarm by secreting pheromones (chemical messengers) into the air. When the bees in the hive detect the alarm pheromones, they swarm out of the hive and attack the predators and protect the hive.

The Hive Keepers:

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. It is also very important to keep the used honeycomb cells ready for re-use for whatever purpose the bees might need them for. After a bee is a housekeeping bee for a certain period of time, they usually move on to another job, such as honey and pollen collecting.

The Undertaker:

Did you know that most honeybees live only 5-7 weeks? The Queen Bee is the exception, thanks to Royal Jelly ­ she lives 5-6 years! But because of the big turn-around in population, something must be done to keep the hive clean of all the dead bees that die in the hive. That is where the Undertaker Bee comes in! The Undertaker Bee¹s job is to collect the bodies of dead bees and take them to the hive entrance, and throw them out onto the ground. This keeps the hive clean and sterile, and the hive a happy place ­ without dead bees everywhere! The Queen stays busy laying eggs, which hatch into new babies, and keep the population of the hive at the appropriate levels. Of course, in the summer, when the bees start bringing pollen back to the hive, the Queen becomes busier than ever laying eggs, because the food is then present to grow the population of the hive tremendously!