Western honey bee

Physical features

• Like other insects, their bodies consist of a head, thorax and abdomen. Attached to their bodies, they also have six legs, two antennae, and two wings.

• The average honey bee worker is 12 millimeters in length (about the width of a standard staple) and weighs 121 milligrams.

• Female bees (workers) have a stinger that is used to defend their hive by injecting venom into intruders. The stinger is barbed in shape so that it remains in place to deliver the venom and causes the bee to become disemboweled after use. Using the stinger often results in death for the bee, typically from dehydration.

• The stinger is an evolutionary modification of the female reproductive organs, so male bees  do not have stingers.

Diet

• Wild – nectar, pollen, honey

• Zoo – nectar, pollen, honey, sugar water, pollen substitute

• Honey bees will forage for food by visiting flowering plants in bloom to collect nectar and pollen. Bees typically focus foraging efforts within a two-mile radius around their hive but will venture as far as five miles.

Reproduction

• Bees go through a standard metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupa, and adult.

• Honey bees are considered eusocial, meaning that, among other things, they have an advanced social structure with a single reproductive female while the other females are cooperative in caring for the young.

• Honey bee reproduction is considered in two capacities: the reproductions of the individual (a bee) and the reproduction of the superorganism (the colony).

Individual Reproduction (Bee)

• In a healthy hive, the queen bee is the only reproductive individual, as her pheromones suppress the reproduction of other females. Worker bees may lay unfertilized eggs in a hive without a healthy queen.

• A queen bee takes one mating flight in her lifetime, typically within the first week of her adult life.  On the mating flight she will mate with as many as 20 or more males and store enough sperm in her spermatheca to fertilize eggs for the rest of her life. At the peak of honey flow, a queen bee can lay over 1,000 eggs per day.

• Honey bees are haplodiploidy, meaning that males develop from unfertilized eggs (haploid) while females develop from fertilized eggs (diploid). As a queen bee lays an egg, she will either fertilize it to produce a female bee or she will withhold fertilization to produce a male bee.

  • • Males (drone bees) develop from unfertilized eggs and are therefore genetic clones of the queen bee. They take 24 days to develop from egg to adulthood.

    • Females develop from fertilized eggs. Most females develop into worker bees, which grow from egg to adulthood over 21 days. When needed, one fertilized egg (female) is fed “royal jelly” after hatching and develops into a queen bee. Queen bees only takes 16 days to reach adulthood.

    • Royal jelly is a secretion from nurse bees of a certain age. Digesting it in the first few days of the larva stage drastically changes that larva’s life by resulting in the development of a larger body and functioning ovaries.

• Since both bee castes come from a fertilized egg, there is no genetic difference between a worker bee egg and a queen bee egg. The only difference is what they are fed in the first two to three days. Therefore, if a queen bee dies or a colony becomes queen-less, the colony can raise a new queen if they act quickly.

Superorganism Reproduction (Hive)

• Honey bees are considered a superorganism due to the collective function of a hive, division of labor, and their inability to survive for long as individuals.

• The honey bee colony (superorganism) reproduces by splitting in half. One half stays to raise a new queen, and the other half of the colony leaves to establish a new colony with as many resources as they can carry, as well as the existing queen. This is called swarming, named after the shape and manner of the exiting half buzzing loudly and flying around to signal to the colony to begin the exodus.

• The decision to split or swarm begins days or even weeks before the actual exodus and is decided collectively as the colony begins to crowd and exceed the physical limits of the hive.

• When a colony swarms, the exiting bees will typically travel a short distance (around 50 meters or 164 feet) and find a place to rest (branch, wall, car, etc.) in a clump or ball shape. From there, several scout bees will depart the ball and look for a new place to create a hive.

• As the scout bees return, they share the quality of potential locations for a new hive with the rest of the bees, and the colony carefully selects the best location through a collective decision-making process. If the location is not perfect, the chance for survival decreases significantly. Less than 25% of feral swarms survive past their first year.

• Once all the scout bees return and the location is selected, the swarm will depart their resting spot to travel to the location of the new hive. Once at the new hive site, the bees will use the resources they brought with them to construct new comb and begin establishing a daughter colony.

Interpretive Information

• A colony is the collective term for a group of related honey bees; a hive is the physical space where a colony creates its nest and lives.

• Despite common misconceptions, the queen bee is not the leader of a colony or even in charge. While as the only reproductive female, she is the single most important individual bee in the hive, decision making is a collective process that is shared by all bees in the hive.

• Shortly after the first flowering plants appeared on Earth, bees started to evolve from their carnivorous wasp ancestors as they transitioned from animal protein to plant protein (pollen). Over time, slight gene mutation in the flowers gave rise to favor slight gene mutation in the bees and vice versa. Today, after millions of years of adaptive radiation and co-evolution, the western honey bee is just one species of approximately 20,000 different species and subspecies of bees that help pollinate nearly 370,000 different flowering plant species.

• Due to her larger size, worker bees will build a special, longer cell for the queen that will be positioned perpendicular to the rest of the cells. The larger shape and orientation make these cells easy for beekeepers to spot. 

• The honey bee is the single most researched insect species on the planet. Research has focused on areas including communication, behavior, cognition, pollination, foraging patterns and preferences, decision making, genetics, altruism and many other subjects.

• Honey bees have an excellent internal clock and can see in ultraviolet, which allows them to know the sun’s position even on overcast days. They are also capable of approximating the sun’s relative position after spending several hours inside the hive.

• When the temperature drops, honey bees generate their own heat by creating a highly organized cluster. The queen is at the center of the cluster because it is imperative to the colony that she survives the winter. They generate heat by vibrating their flight muscles. The center of the cluster can reach up to 95°F while outer edges may only be 40-50°F. Due to this variance, bees rotate and change places in the cluster.

  • • Because the cluster is unable to move much without losing heat, honey stores need to be close together. For this reason, honey bees are systematic in the organization of honey stores throughout the year.

Pollination

• Bees are nature’s unwitting matchmakers. When they travel between flowers collecting nectar and pollen to eat or bring back to their hive, they inadvertently pick up and transfer grains of pollen from the male part of a flower (anther) to the female part of a flower (stigma). This process allows the plants to reproduce and produce seeds or fruit.

• All bee species are broken up into nine families that are divided into three broad groups based on the length of their tongues – a feature that determines how far into a flower they can drink nectar and therefore which flowers a certain species will visit.

Communication

• Honey bees can communicate in a variety of ways.

• One of the most well-known forms of communication is called the waggle dance, which they use to communicate the location and quality of a resource and recruit other bees to collect it. Through research, scientists have been able to translate the exact meaning of the bee’s waggle dance.

  • • Directly up (as a direction) substitutes for the sun.

    • Angle of the movement relative to up= angle to travel relative to the sun

    • Length of the dance= amount of energy required for travel (1 second ~ 1 km)

    • Intensity of the waggle = quality of resource site

• Inside the hive, bees use pheromones to communicate for a variety of reasons.

  • • Queen bees secrete pheromones that are distributed throughout the hive to let all the bees know that there is a queen. Her pheromones also suppress worker bees’ abilities to lay eggs.

    • Bees can also use pheromones to alarm other bees to danger. Beekeepers will use smoke to mask these alarm pheromones when they are working in a hive.

    • They will also release alarm pheromones when they sting or die to alert other bees to potential danger.

• Bees also communicate resource needs of the hive through behavior.

  • • Younger bees meet foragers as they return to collect the resources they are bringing back (water, pollen or nectar). The younger bees prioritize the needs of the colony and take the more needed resources quickly. If a forager has difficultly passing off a resource, she will prioritize collecting a different resource.

Honey

• Honey bees are the only insects on the planet that produce a food that is eaten by humans: honey. However, honey’s original purpose is to provide food for the colony to survive winter when it’s too cold for bees to survive outside the hive and there are no flowers blooming (and therefore no food for bees to collect).

• Honey bees naturally convert nectar into honey.

  • • While collecting nectar, they store some in their honey stomachs – a special reservoir not connected to the digestive system. Special enzymes (called invertase) in the honey stomach break down the natural plant sugars (sucrose) into simple sugars (glucose and fructose). This process is called inversion.

    • When foraging bees return to the hive, they regurgitate the inverted nectar for younger bees who break it down even further. The younger bees then regurgitate the nectar into an empty cell.

    • Hive bees beat their wings to evaporate remaining water in the nectar. As the water evaporates, the sugar thickens to form honey. Once the honey has the appropriate water content, the bees cap the cell to preserve the honey for when they need it.

    • Nectar starts out at about 80% water, and the final honey product is between 14-18% water. If the water content is too high, the honey can crystalize or even ferment.

• You may see different “flavors” of honey at the grocery store or farmers market. Honey gets its flavor from the plants that bees visit, not from additives. Subsequently, honey can taste drastically different depending on geographic location and time of year.

• Bees have to visit about 2 million different flowers to collect enough nectar to produce one pound of honey.

Beekeeping

• Beekeeping is the practice of human management of honey bees. Some of the earliest known examples of beekeeping are from ancient Egypt dating back to 2400 BCE and could go back as far as 5000 BCE.

• Today, beekeeping ranges in scale from the backyard enthusiast to the giant commercial business. Commercial beekeepers will pack up their hives and travel around the country to sell their pollination services to the crops that are in bloom and then typically over winter their hives in warmer southern states after the blooms are done.

• Beekeeping requires the use of certain tools in order to safely and effectively work a hive.

  • • Bee suit/veil: a suit with a screened covering over the face that allows the beekeeper to work the hive without the risk of getting stung by a bee defending its hive.

    • Smoker: a metal cylinder with a hole at the top and bellow on the side. The cylinder will safely contain a small fire and the bellow is used to force smoke out of the hole into where the beekeeper needs it. The smoke masks any pheromones that the honey bees release to warn other bees of danger or intruders.

    • Hive tool: a small metal pry bar that is used to separate frames and boxes from each other. Honey bees seal any openings with beeswax and propolis, and the hive tool is essential for separating them.

Updated May 2020