About Honey Bees

Honey Bees live in a nest, called a "hive." A single hive can have up to 80,000 bees, mostly workers. It is usually located in a hollow tree.

Made of wax and honeycomb, it is the place they store their food; honey. Bees attached their wax combs to the hive's roof and walls. When the bees feel that their hive is threatened, they will protect it aggressively. The bee does not know if you are a bear, skunk or a human. They are protecting the hive to keep you from stealing their food and killing their young, which is natural to all animals and insects.

Honeycomb is layers of wax cells (little rooms) made into a hexagonal (six-sided) shape. The queen will lay eggs in the cells and Honey Bee babies, called larvae, will hatch. Larvae will eventually pupate (make a coccoon in their cells), and hatch out as adult bees. Honey Bees eat nectar and pollen from flowers. Nectar is the liquid in a flower, and pollen is a powdery substance which must be transferred from one flower to another to make more flowers. Larvae eat honey.

The Colony

Honey bees are social insects, with a marked division of labor between the various types of bees in the colony. A colony of honey bees includes a queen, drones and workers.

Queens bees are larger than the other bees in the hive and rarely leave this protected area except to mate. It is the queen honeybees' job to lay eggs and produce a kind of chemical called a pheromone that causes the worker honeybees to lose interest in reproducing. The life of most queen honeybees is a busy affair, rarely lasting longer than four years. Each day the queen produces close to 2,000 eggs stopping in short intervals to be fed by the worker honeybees. At any time during her life cycle if the queen finds she can no longer produce the chemical pheromone or lay eggs the workers begin preparing a new queen. The worker honeybee does this by taking one egg from a newly laid batch and placing it in a cell that has been prepared to produce a queen. When the larva has hatched it is fed only royal jelly which is produced by the workers. When the new queen emerges she will immediately set about destroying other queens that may have hatched and even any that have not hatched. The queen will then leave the hive and fly to an area where thousands of drone suitors are waiting to mate. Once she has mated with several of the drones she will return to the hive to begin laying eggs.

The workers, in turn, collect nectar, build the comb, make honey, feed the queen and tend to the newly hatched larva. The hardest worker in a hive is the worker honeybee. These busy creatures secrete and form the wax that produces the honeycomb. Each pod of the comb is made large enough to hold honey, pollen or one of the developing larvae. The worker honeybee is also responsible for gathering pollen, making honey, capping off each pod when it is full, feeding the queen, chasing away drones, tending the larvae and protecting the nest. In most cases the honeybee you see zooming around fields of flowers is a worker honeybee. Even though the queen honeybee is equipped with a stinger that can be used repeatedly, the workers stinger can only be used once and results in death. The life span of the worker honeybee is approximately one month during honey production but during the colder months of the year they can live up to three months.

Drones are the noisiest of the honeybee clan, producing a loud buzz as they move around. The only function of the drone is to reproduce with the queen but since they lack stingers or food gathering body parts they remain near the hive to be fed and protected by the workers. Since the drones have little value to the hive activity except at certain times of the year they are only allowed around the hive when it is time to mate. Once the queen has mated most drones are driven from the nest to starve. The "drones" are male bees that have developed from unfertilized eggs. They do no work and are stingless. Their only job is to mate with the queen. An unmated queen will lay drone eggs. She will only lay worker eggs if she is fertilized. In autumn, when the honey flow is over, so is the need for drones. The workers will allow the drones to starve to death when the egg laying season finishes, and they would eat too much of the stored honey if allowed to live over the winter.