The Honey Bee

The Honey Bee

Compiled by Glen K. Hester

1. Introduction

Insects are by far the most numerous group of animals in the world. Butterflies are considered beautiful and wonderful to hold, but few people will pick up a Praying Mantis. Most of us consider insects ugly and pests, especially if they are found in our homes. Yet without them the world, as we know it would be a vastly different place. One third of the human diet is derived directly or indirectly from insect-pollinated plants. An estimated 80 percent of insect crop pollination is accomplished by honeybees.

When people think of bees they usually only think of one thing - the sting. Honeybees are herbivores and not aggressive creatures by nature. They only use their stinger if they feel threatened. Most people are stung by the more aggressive yellow jackets or wasps.

The study of the honeybee in the classroom will provide your students with a fascinating look into the life of one of the "social insects". It will increase the students knowledge about the role of this insect in the ecosystem, and help to alleviate the unjustified fear which many people have towards them. It would also serve as a good introduction and preparation for a field trip to a commercially run apiary.

2. Background

Honeybees have been present on the Earth for millions of years. One of the oldest agricultural pursuits known to man is beekeeping. Early settlers to North America had a limited and expensive source of sugar, so honeybees were exported from Europe to establish apiaries here. The honey and beeswax gathered were used for many purposes. Today, many advances have been made in this aspect of agriculture. Some people derive their income from their apiaries while many others keep honeybees as a hobby.

3. The Beehive

Honeybees are called "social insects" because they live together in a society with adults and young sharing the same dwelling, and they exhibit a co-operative behaviour. No individual honeybee can survive on its own. They are all dependent of each other. Honeybees cannot be domesticated, but they are just as much at home in a man-made hive as they are in a hollow tree or cave.

Beehives are constructed from a wide variety of materials throughout the world including mud, straw, and wooden boxes. In North America most beekeepers use a series of wooden box frames placed on top of each other to form a beehive. The major parts of a hive are shown in diagram one.

DIAGRAM 1 - PARTS OF THE HIVE

Outer cover Keeps rain and snow from entering the hive. It is usually covered with metal.

Inner cover Fits snugly over the top honey sugar to keep the honeybees in and everything else out

Honey supers Each super holds 9 frames of honeycomb. This is where extra honey is stored by the honeybees. As one super is filled with honey the beekeeper adds another one throughout the summer months. It is this honey which the beekeeper harvests.

Queen excluder a frame of metal bars wide enough for worker honeybees to pass through, but not the queen. This keeps the queen laying eggs in the brood chamber, not in the honey supers.

Brood chambers Each chamber holds 9 frames of honeycomb in which the queen lays her eggs.  The eggs develop into adults here. This is the part of the hive where most of the honeybees are found, and the only place to find the queen. Most beekeepers use two brood chambers. Honey and pollen are stored here as food for the honeybees.

Bottom board Supports all of the boxes holding the bees and honey. It is the main entrance for the bees.

Hive stand Keeps the hive off of the ground to prevent the wood from rotting.

4. Occupants of the Hive

In a beehive there are different kinds of honeybees each having different responsibilities and characteristics.

THE QUEEN

The queen is the mother of all the honeybees in the hive. She does not act as a ruler of the hive, but she is waited upon, fed, and protected by the worker honeybees. The queen has one job in the hive. As the only fertile adults. She mates only once in her life and stores the sperm in a special organ until she needs it to lay eggs. She may lay as many as 2,000 eggs in a single day. A queen may live for three years. The queen can be recognized in the hive by her long narrow abdomen and short wings.

The queen leaves the hive only for her mating flight. However, if the hive becomes too crowded early in the season, she may leave and take half of the honeybees with her. This swarm then searches for a new home. A new pupa queen is left behind to make certain the old colony survives.

THE DRONES

The male occupants of the hive are larger than the workers and can be recognized by a large, round, dark abdomen. The drone does no work within the hive. His only responsibility is to mate with a virgin queen. Drones have no stinger. In the fall of the year, the workers force the drones out of the hive to lower the population and conserve food supplies for themselves and the queen.

THE WORKERS

Most of the honeybees in the hive are female workers. Although these are female honeybees, they are infertile so no threat is posed to the queen's position in the hive hierarchy. They are the smallest inhabitants in the hive. A worker honeybee has a long list of responsibilities and duties to perform which change as she matures during her short 35-45 day summer lifespan. (See Table 1)

Once the worker has emerged from her honeycomb cell she serves as a nurse bee. Nurses feed the brood (the baby larva), and clean brood cells in which the queen will lay eggs. During the following two weeks she serves as a house bee. House bees clean the comb, secrete wax to build cells, make honey, store pollen, feed and clean the queen and guard the hive against intruders. Once her work inside the hive is done, she graduates to her last job, field bee. Field bees collect the pollen, nectar, and water to feed the whole colony.

Workers live only for such a short period of time. They work so much in and out of the hive,  that they literally wear out their wings and cannot return to the hive.

TABLE ONE - AGE AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF WORKER HONEYBEES

Age (days) Responsibilities

1-2 Cleans cells and warms brood

3-5 Feeds older larvae

6-11

Feeds younger larvae

12-17

Hive repair, food transport within the hive, attend queen

18-21 Guard the hive entrance

22-45

Field bee collecting pollen, nectar and water

5. Lifecycle

Although the inhabitants of the hive have different duties and physical characteristics they all pass through the same stages of the lifecycle. The honeybee goes through complete metamorphosis.

Egg - In the egg stage, the genetic material of the queen and one of the many drones with whom she mated, are combined and develop into an embryo. The embryo will hatch into a larva, the second stage of the lifestyle.

Larva - This is also known as the grub period in the honeybee's life. The tiny white semi-circle develops and grows as it feeds on the food brought to it by the workers.

Pupa - After the larva has matured it enters the pupa stage. At this time the larva's cell is capped over to seal in the pupa. Inside this cell the larva undergoes a metamorphosis and changes from an opaque, white larva into a mature black and yellow adult honeybee. The new adult chews away the cell cap and emerges to take her place in the hive population.

TABLE TWO - LIFECYCLE OF THE HONEYBEE (DAYS)

Stage Egg Larva Pupa Total

Queen 3 5 1/2 7 1/2 16

Worker 3 6 12 21

Drone 3 6 1/2 14 1/2 24

6. Pollination

Honeybees need plants that produce flowers, and flowering plants need honeybees. The main value of honeybees to mankind, is in the cross-pollination of flowering plants and fruit blossoms. Most of our fruit and seed crops would not produce if it was not for the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another. About one-third of the total human diet is derived directly or indirectly from insect pollinated plants. An estimated 80 percent of insect crop pollination is accomplished by the honeybee. Honeybees are highly specialized vegetarians, eating only nectar and pollen which are produced by flowering plants.

When a honeybee lands on a flower to collect the nectar it gets covered with pollen. The dust-like pollen clings to the hairs on the honeybee's body. When the honeybee visits the next flower the pollen on its body brushes off against the female part (pistil) of that flower. When pollen is carried from one plant to another it is called cross-pollination.

Some plants have bright colored petals to attract honeybees, others produce scents to attract this pollinating insect. Plants which produce nectar secrete only small amounts at one time. This encourages many visits by many honeybees, which in turn increases the possibility that the plant will be successfully fertilized.

Many fruit tree farmers hire beekeepers to place hives of honeybees in their orchards during the blossoming season. They do this, to ensure that the flowers on their trees are pollinated properly, so that a healthy crop of fruit will be produced later in the growing season.

At the University of Guelph environmental biologists are experimenting with using honeybees to help control strawberry rot. A naturally occurring micro fungus will prevent the rot. A dispenser has been developed that fits on a beehive, so that emerging honeybees will inadvertently pick up and carry the spores of the biocontrol fungus. In the course of their flight the honeybees leave some of the spores on each flower, enough t prevent infection in the flower and fruit.

7. Honey and Pollen

The female worker bees venture out to hills and valleys foraging nectar and pollen to nourish the entire hive population.

Pollen provides the bees with an excellent source of protein and vitamins. This brightly coloured substance can be seen attached to the "pollen baskets" (area of long hairs on top of the hind legs) of the workers when they fly back to the hive.

Flower nectar plays an important part in the diet of the honeybee as it is their principal source of carbohydrates and energy. The worker consumes the nectar and stores it in her "honey sac" for transportation back to the hive. Enzymes in the honey sac help transform the nectar into honey after the worker has regurgitated it into waiting cells.

A honeybee colony does not work to provide their apiarist with honey as rent for their accommodations. The stores of honey they produce are intended to act as food supplies for the winter. For that reason, when apiarists remove a crop of honey they will leave enough for the bees to survive the winter.

8. Communication

In order for the hive to operate efficiently, honeybees have developed a complex form of communication, which we do not yet fully understand.

In order to direct other worker honeybees to a source of nectar or pollen a returning worker uses a "dance language" within the darkness of the hive. The necessary information is communicated to the other workers in this dance. This saves the other field workers time and energy so that they can fly directly to the food source. The honeybees use the sun as a type of compass to indicate direction. They can sense the direction of the sun even on hazy days.

Honeybees do two basic types of dances: the "round" and the "waggle". If the food is up to ten metres away, the worker will do the round dance. If the food is more than one hundred metres, the worker will do the waggle dance. Between ten and one hundred metres the worker does a combination of the two dances.

THE ROUND DANCE

The returning worker does her dance on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. If the nectar is less than 100 metres from the hive she moves in a circle in one direction. Then she turns around and runs in another circle in the other direction. They can buzz around near the hive and quickly find the flowers. They know what kind of flowers to look for by the smell clinging to the body of the returning bee, and by tasting a sample of the nectar she shares with them.

THE WAGGLE DANCE

If the nectar is more than 100 metres from the hive, the returning worker does the waggle dance. This gives the other workers the direction and distance (flying time) to the food source. First she dances in a straight line rapidly wagging her tail. Then she turns and walks around a half circle, and dances back along the same straight line. Then she turns in the other direction and walks around the other half of the circle, and returns once more to her straight line. As she does this she wags her tail. The number of times the dance is repeated per minute tells how far the food is from the hive. A fast dance means the food is close to the hive, a slow dance means it is further away.

The straight line of the dance shows the direction to the nectar in relation to the sun. On the vertical honeycomb, a dance done straight up means fly away from the sun. If the dancer moves on a line to the left of straight up, that means, "Go to the entrance of the hive, look at the sun, and fly to the left". When the nectar is all gone, the returning workers do not dance, so that no more workers will go to that location.

DANCE OF THE HONEYBEE

9. Gathering the Honey

In late summer the apiarist collects the honey supers from the hive leaving the brood chambers in place. It is the honey stored in this part of the hive that will see the colony through the winter.

The frames which are full of honey are removed from the supers only when the beekeeper is ready to work with them. First he must remove the top cap seals from the honeycomb using a hot uncapping knife. Once this is done, the frame is placed in an extracting machine, which forces the honey from the honeycomb by centrifugal force. The honey runs down the side of the extractor and out a hole in the front, at the bottom of the machine. Before the honey is put into jars it is strained to remove any foreign materials such as beeswax and other impurities from the extraction process. The colour of the honey depends on the type of nectar that was collected. Clover produces honey with the lightest colour and mildest flavour. Buckwheat honey is the darkest in colour and strongest tasting. Beeswax is produced by the workers to make the honeycomb within the hive. It is used for the brood chambers and the storing of the honey. We use this wax for many things such as makeup, cold creams, lipstick, shaving cream, shoe and furniture polishes, candles, chewing gum, crayons, and waterproofing, to name a few.

10. The Sting

Honeybees are bred to be very gentle and will only sting to defend themselves, or the colony. More people are stung by Wasps and Yellow Jackets than honeybees. If a honeybee lands on your arm, blow it off...don't hit it. The queen has a stinger which she only uses on other queens. Drones do not have stingers. A worker has a stinger which is barbed so that, once pushed into the vi victim, it cannot be pulled out. The whole stinger mechanism pulls out of the bee's body when she tries to withdraw it, so she dies shortly afterwards. The stinger and the venom pump are left behind and continue to inject poison into the victim. If you are stung by a honeybee, scrape the stinger away immediately with a fingernail. Do not try and pull the stinger out by squeezing it, as this will inject more of the venom into you.