Did you know? Honey Bee.

Honey bee

Honeybees are the most useful insects to mankind.They live in their own colonies with well defined social order and working together in a highly disciplined manner. The working bee identifies its home on the basis of a particular smell emitted by the queen bee. Even more than 200 beehive colonies are kept side by side, the working bee will never make a mistake to enter the bee hive other than its own. Each wild colony generally has 20,000 individual bees which may go up to 80,000 in domesticated bees.

There is only one queen in a hive and her main purpose is to make more bees. She can lay over 1,500 eggs per day and will live two to eight years. She has a longer abdomen than the workers or drones. She has chewing mouthparts. Her stinger is curved with no barbs on it and she can use it many times.

Drones are males and are dosile have no stings. They live about eight weeks. Their population is decided and controlled by the queen bee. Only a few hundred - at most - are ever present in the hive. Their sole function is to mate queen bee when she is on her nuptial flight outside the beehive or colony but never inside the colony. A drone's eyes are noticeably bigger than those of the other castes. This helps them to spot the queens at a distance during the flight. Any drones left at the end of the season are considered non-essential and will be driven out of the hive by the working bees to die.

Worker bees are sterile females and do all the different tasks needed to maintain and operate the hive. When young, they are called house bees and work in the hive doing comb construction, brood rearing, tending the queen and drones, cleaning, temperature regulation and defending the hive. Older workers are called field bees. They forage outside the hive to gather nectar, pollen, water and certain sticky plant resins used in hive. Workers will live about 6 weeks. Workers bees have a structure called a pollen basket on each hind leg, an extra stomach for storing and transporting nectar or honey and four pairs of special glands that secrete beeswax on the underside of their abdomen. They have a straight, barbed stinger which can only be used once. It rips out of their abdomen killing the bee after use.

Honey bees like most insects, look at the world through compound eyes. These are made of hundreds of small simple eyes called ommatidia. The images received by all the ommatidia are put together in the bee’s brain to give it a very different way of seeing the world.

Compare the behavior and discipline of human beings with the simple bee which relentlessly travels up to 50 kms a day to collect up to 0.5 mg of nectar. If it is late evening, they just remain sleep where they are and return the hives the next day with either stomach full of nectar or basket full of pollen.

Bees are the marvelous creatures and watch them with love how they are busy during your tension filled moments. You will certainly enjoy them and their working.