Essential Information & explanations, latest texts & monographs on
Bee.
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Bee Season: A Novel by Myla Goldberg
Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston
The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman
First Comes Love : All About The Birds And Bees - And Alligators, Possums, And People, Too. by Jennifer Davis
Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch by Haywood Smith
The Bee Tree by Patricia Polacco
The Honeybee and the Robber: A Moving/Picture Book by Eric Carle
50 State Quarters CollectorKids Guide Handbook and Coin Album by Checker Bee Publishing
The Cob Builders Handbook: You Can Hand-Sculpt Your Own Home by Becky Bee
The Magic School Bus: Inside a Beehive (Magic School Bus (Paper)) by Joanna Cole
Hive Management: A Seasonal Guide for Beekeepers by Richard E. Bonney
Bee
Bees
Honeybee
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Hymenoptera
Superfamily: Apoidea
Families
Andrenidae
Anthophoridae
Apidae
Colletidae
Ctenoplectridae
Halictidae
Megachilidae
Melittidae
Stenotritidae
Bees are flying insects, closely related to wasps and ants. They are adapted for feeding on nectar, and play an important role in pollinating flowering plants, and are called pollinators. Bees have a long tongue that they use in order to obtain the nectar from flowers. Bees have antennae made up of thirteen segments in males and twelve in females. They have two pairs of wings the back pair being the smaller of the two. Their legs are modified so that they can gather pollen and the apex of their abdomens are modified into a stinger.
There are over 16,000 described species, and possibly around 30,000 species in total. Bees may be solitary, or may live in various sorts of communities.
The most advanced of these are eusocial colonies, found among the honeybees and stingless bees.
Sociality is believed to have evolved separately in different groups of bees.
Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide")
1 Eusocial Bees
2 Solitary, communal, and quasisocial Bees
3 Kleptoparasitic Bees
4 Miscellaneous
5 See also
6 External links and references
Eusocial Bees
Eusocial bees live in large hives, each of which has a single queen, together with workers and drones.
The life cycle of bumblebees begins in the spring when the queen bee rises from hibernation. At this time the queen bee is the one who does all the work because there are no worker bees to do the work yet. She searches for a place to build her nest and she builds the honeypots. She also does the foraging to collect nectar and pollen. Bumblebee colonies die off in the autumn, after raising a last generation of queens, which suvive individually in found hiding spots. Interestingly bumblebee queens sometimes seek winter safety in honeybee hives, where they are sometimes found dead in the spring by beekeepers, presumably stung to death by the honeybees. It is not known whether any succed in winter survival in such an environment.
With honeybees, which survive winter as a colony, the queen begins egg laying in winter, to prepare for spring. This is probably triggered by day length. She is the only fertile female, and deposits all the eggs from which the other bees are produced. Except for her one mating flight or to establish a new colony, the queen rarely leaves the hive after the larvae have become full grown bees. The queen deposits each egg in a cell prepared by the worker bees. The egg hatches into a small larva which is fed by nurse bees (worker bees who maintain the interior of the colony). After about a week (depending on species), the larva is sealed up in its cell by the nurse bees. After another week (again, depending on species), it will emerge an adult bee.
The larvae and pupae in a frame of honeycome are referred to as frames of brood and are often sold (with adhering bees) by beekeepers to other beekeepers to start new beehives.
Both workers and queens are fed royal jelly during the first three days of the larval stage. Then workers are switched to a diet of pollen and nectar or diluted honey, while those intended for queens will continue to receive royal jelly. This causes the larva to develop to the pupa stage more quickly, while being also larger and fully developed sexually. Queen breeders consider good nutrition during the larval stage to be of critical importance to the quality of the queens raised, good genetics and sufficient number of matings also being factors. During the larval and pupal stages, various parasites can attack the pupa/larva and destroy or mutate it.
Peanut-like queen brood cellsare extended outward from the broodcomb.
Queens are not raised in typical horizontal brood cells of the honeycomb. They are specially constructed to be much larger, and have a vertical orientation. As the queen finishes her larval feeding, and pupates, she moves into a head downward position, from which she will later chew her way out of the cell. At pupation the workers cap or seal the cell. Just prior to emerging from their cells, young queens can often be heard "piping." This is considered likely to be a challenge to other queens for battle.
Worker bees are infertile females. Worker bees secrete the wax used to build the hive, clean and maintain the hive, raise the young, guard the hive and forage for nectar and pollen.
In honeybees, the worker bees have a modified ovipositor called a stinger with which they can sting to defend the hive, but the bee will die soon after.
Drone bees are the male bees of the colony. Drone honeybees do not forage for nectar or pollen. The primary purpose of a drone bee is to fertilize a new queen. Drones mate with the queen in flight.
They die immediately after mating.
In some species, drones are suspected of playing a contributing role in the temperature regulation of the hive. Drone bees have no stinger, since a stinger is actually a modified ovipositor.
Queens live on an average about three years. The workers have but a brief existence, not three months long on an average.
Honeybee queens release pheromones to regulate hive activities, and worker bees also produce pheromones for various communications.
Solitary, communal, and quasisocial Bees
Some other bees form small colonies. For example, most species of bumblebee (Bombus terrestris, B. pratorum, et al.) live in colonies of 30-400 bees.
(By contrast, an average honeybee hive at the height of summer will have 40,000 - 80,000 bees.)
The queen bee is typically able to survive on her own for at least a short time (unlike queens in eusocial species who must be cared for at all times).
Other species of bee such as the Orchard Mason bee (Osmia lignaria) and the hornfaced bee (Osmia cornifrons) are solitary in that every female is fertile.
There are no worker bees for these species.
Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax.
They are immune from tracheal and varroa mites, but have their own unique parasites, pests and diseases. (see diseases of the honeybee)
Kleptoparasitic Bees
Cuckoo bees are bumblebee look-alikes that invade bumblebee nests and lay their eggs. The bumblebees raise the young as their own. Megachilid bees also have other megachilid Coelioxys bees whose young are placed into the already provisioned nests of these solitary bees. They destroy the host larvae and eat the food.
Miscellaneous
All bees eat nectar and pollen.
Bees are excellent pollinators and play an important role in agriculture.
Bees are the favorite meal of Merops apiaster, a bird.
See also
External links and references
The above article is adapted from from Wikipedia All Wikipedia article text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
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