Meet the Hive

Okay, Danger Will Robinson. This could be filled up with the entire internet on honey bees. I will try for the readers digest version.

Honey bees are one species of Bees. There are currently estimated to be around 20,000 different species of bees. Most bees are solitary, live underground, and don't really make honey. Honey bees live in cavities, caves, openings, or even exposed like on tree branches. There are about 7 different species of honey bees and around 44 different subspecies of bees.

We really only have one type of honey bee in the US, Apis mellifera. Honey bees you generally talk about are a sub species to this species of honey bee (Italians, Russian, African, German, Caucasian, Buckfast, etc,). Fun Note: Bumble Bees are not honey bees. and are not even the species, but they are the same family.

The honey bee is not native to the US, it was brought in with the Jamestown settlers. Indians have a slang term for them...white man's flies. There are many native species of bees to the US but they are not honey bees.

The honey bee is an insect as are all bees. The honey bee has 6 legs, three body parts, head, thorax, and abdomen. It has 4 wings (not 2). It has 5 eyes, 2 large compound eyes and 3 small eyes on it's forehead called ocelli. There are three types of bees in a honey bee hive.

The Worker:

The workers which are all female. The workers make up the majority of the population. They are all sisters and daughters to the queen. They do all the work, They cook, clean, mow the yard...sorry I digress. The worker bees go the flowers get the nectar and pollen, They build the comb, they feed and care for the babies and they clean the hive. They have an average life span of 45 days. The worker bees are the ones with the sharp pointy thing in their abdomen, we call that a stinger.

The Drone:

There are no king bees. The boy bees are called drones. They are distinguished from the female workers buy their large bodies and huge compound eyes. The drones do not collect nectar or pollen, they don't build comb. So what do purpose do they serve? The same purpose most males serve...mating. They mate with queen bees. Ask you mom and dad for more information on this. They live about a year. The hive kicks them out in winter when resources are low and the bees eventually die of starvation or freeze to death...much to the delight of women everywhere (not scientifically backed statement).

The Queen:

This is a female worker that is fertile. Sterile females are workers. The queen is responsible for laying all the eggs and making an assessment of the hive and it's needs (sort of). She is tolerated by the workers as long as she is healthy and laying eggs. She will average anywhere from 1000 to 3000 eggs a day. One egg is laid in each cell of the comb. While the queen is doing this she is giving off a pheromones. Those pheromones do many things, they keep the workers from becoming fertile which (would be bad for the hive), They identify the hive from other hives. They tell the health of the queen. Should the pheromones decrease the workers will become unhappy. If the queen shows signs of not being healthy, she could be killed by the workers. The queen lives an around 3-5 years.

The hive when healthy and in peak times of the year will have anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 bees. They hive numbers can get up into the 100,000 range but usually about that time the hive is looking to swarm. Anyone who tells you they had a hive with a million honey bees didn't count them. The numbers don't get that high.

Swarms

Honey bees breed in a weird way, as if there isn't enough weird things about honey bees. You see thousands of stinging insects, the hive functions as a super organism. One big living thing. When there is plenty of resources the queen will lay lots of eggs. The hive population increases dramatically. It gets so big it gets way crowded and not very sustainable. The workers start saying this is way to damn crowded, the band sucks and the drinks are all watered down. We are leaving. So they start making queen cells which will be a new queen after much fighting. The old queen and half the honey bees leave in search of a new home. The bees and queen bounce from one place to another looking for a home. This cluster of bees is called a swarm. They have no comb and no steady home. They send out scout bees who look for a home. Sometimes they find your roof or wall, maybe your water meter. Honey bees will make homes in lots of things. Once they are building comb the queen will start laying gain. They will become more protective of this home. At this point they are no longer a swarm, they are a hive.