Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)
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Bee!
WHAT
DO BEES LOOK LIKE? All bees have a head, a thorax (middle section),
and an abdomen (end section). The head has
their eyes, feelers, and tongue. The thorax
has six legs and two wings. The abdomen has
the breathing sacs, scent gland, wax gland, poison gland, and the stinger on the very end. Honey bees are hairy.
They are yellow and black in color. The
back legs of the worker females have little sacs to carry pollen
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1. ______________ 2. ______________ 3. ______________ 4. ______________ 5. ______________ 6. ______________ 7. ______________ 8. ______________ |
Match these words with the numbers on the picture. Write the words on the correct line to the side. WORD LIST: Antennas, Eyes, Legs, Pollen Sacs, Stinger, Tongue, Wax Gland, Wings |
WHAT ARE WORKERS, DRONES, QUEENS, AND LARVAE? There is only one queen per hive, and all she does
is lay eggs. There may be 40,000 worker bees. The workers are all female, but they can’t
have babies. There may be as many as 2000
males or drones. Drones don’t do any
work. Only a few drones get to be fathers of
the babies. All the rest just hang around. The queen is the biggest, and the workers are the
smallest. The queen lays her eggs in a cell of
the honeycomb (hive). Each egg hatches, and a
little worm-like larva crawls out. The worker
bees feed pollen and honey to the baby larva. Soon,
this larva spins a little web blanket inside the cell and becomes a pupa. After 16 to 24 days, a full grown bee climbs out of
the cell. Worker bees take care of the babies,
make wax, build the honeycomb, clean up the hive, store pollen, make honey, guard the
hive, and collect pollen or nectar. When
someone says “busy as a bee,” they are definitely talking about the workers. If a worker (sterile female) is born in the spring,
she probably only lives 4 or 5 weeks. If she’s
born in the fall when there’s less work to do, she may survive the winter. Drones (males) are kicked out of the hive when the
weather gets cold. Queens can live for several
years.
WHAT
DO BEES EAT? Adult bees eat nectar (sugary water) and pollen
(yellow protein powder) which are made by flowers. Babies
are fed lots of pollen, because they need the protein to grow. Since there are lots of flowers in the spring (and
lots of pollen), most bee babies are born in the spring.
Nectar is what a worker bee uses to make honey. When she gets to a flower, she drinks as much
nectar as she can hold. Then she passes the
nectar to another worker bee (who holds the nectar on her tongue) so the water in it can
evaporate. When most of the water has
evaporated, the sweet nectar becomes honey, which is stored in the hive. During winter, when there aren’t many flowers,
bees use this stored honey for food. In the
spring and summer, when there are plenty of flowers, bees tell each other where to find
nectar and pollen. If a worker finds a palm
tree with lots of flowers, she marks it with a pheromone (scent). Then she flies back and dances in the hive. This dance tells other workers what direction to
fly in and how far to go. Then they fly off to
find her scent, the palm flowers, and the food.
WHAT
IS POLLINATION? Flowering plants need to get their pollen (the
powder in the flowers) from one plant to another one.
Once the pollen is on the new plant, that new flower can make seeds (baby
plants). This is called pollination. When a bee visits a flower to get nectar or pollen,
it has to get really deep in the flower to reach these foods. If she is collecting nectar, the bee slurps it up
with her long tongue. If she is collecting
pollen, she stuffs the powdery pollen into little sacks on the back of her legs. While she’s doing this, she gets the dusty
pollen all over her body. When she flies to
the next flower, some of the pollen falls off. Presto,
the new flower is pollinated! Because of this,
flowers try to attract bees by having brightly colored petals, pretty smells, and very
sweet nectar. Bees and flowers help each
other. This kind of relationship in nature is
called “symbiosis” (sim-bee-O-sis).
HOW
DO BEES SEE? Bees cannot see the color red. But they do see a color we can’t: ultraviolet (UV).
UV light is what gives us a sunburn. But
to a bee, it’s a whole different color. Since
bees can’t see red, red flowers are pollinated in other ways, by bats, butterflies,
birds, or the wind. Flowers that want to
attract bees have colors that bees can see. Often,
white flowers, which look plain to us, actually reflect UV light, so they look very pretty
to bees.
WHAT
IS A HIVE? A hive is the bees’ home. It is made mostly of wax. Worker bees can make wax from the bottom of their
abdomens (bellies). They use their legs to
shape this wax into the cells of their honeycomb or hive.
Each cell is hexagonal or six-sided. The
hive usually has several layers of cells. Some
cells are just for baby bees. Near the baby
bee section, there are cells for storing pollen. In
other parts of the hive, there are cells just for storing honey. The queen stays in the hive for her whole life
except when she flies off to mate. All the
bees stay inside the hive at night to sleep. Hives
may be inside hollow logs. HOW DOES A BEE STING? A bee has a poison gland in her abdomen. When she stings another insect (like a wasp), she
can pull the stinger out of the wasp’s body and get away. So if a bee is fighting another insect, she can
sting many times. But if a bee stings a person
or a large animal (frog, raccoon, etc.) the stinger sticks in the animal’s tough skin
and keeps pumping poison. The bee flies away,
but she gets torn in half and dies. Bees only
sting if they think they or their hive are in danger.
If one bee is buzzing around you, she may smell perfume, soap, or hair spray
and think the smell is nectar (food). She will
check you out to see if she can find the nectar, but if you stand very still, she will
realize there is no nectar and go away.
WHAT
ARE SOME DANGERS TO BEES?
Right now, almost all of Florida’s honey bees
live on honey farms called apiaries (A-pee-air-eez). There
aren’t many wild bee hives left because a tiny pest, called a Varroa Mite, is killing
them. Bee farmers can use special chemicals to
stop the varroa mite on their farm, but no one can help the bees hiding in the wild. If a new queen leaves a bee farm with her swarm of
workers, the varroa mite will probably destroy her new hive.
When a bee farmer takes honey from a hive, he always leaves enough for the
bees to eat over the winter. It is important
to take care of Florida’s bees. Orange
trees need bees to pollinate them so they can make fruits and seeds. Without bees, many of the oranges wouldn’t be
able to grow.
WHAT
ABOUT KILLER BEES? These
are Africanized Honey Bees or AHB’s. These
bees are a mix of European bees and African bees. We
have European bees here. They make a lot of
honey and don’t sting much, but they don’t live well in really hot areas. African bees were brought over to South America
because they do like to live in the heat. When
these two kinds of bees mated, the new bees (AHB’s) were smaller and very defensive. AHB’s
act like normal bees while they are foraging for food, but if they feel their hive is in
danger, they will defend it, attacking the people and animals for at least 100 feet around
the hive. The AHB’s traveled up into
Texas, but stopped and went up the Rio Grande River. They
are not established in Florida yet. We already
have yellow jackets, small wasps that are just as defensive as the AHB’s. So, killer bees are not so scary. Just stay away from bee hives, and tell a grown-up
when you see one.
Florida Cooperative Extension Service Pamphlets.
Frisch, Karl Von. The Dancing Bees. New York: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York. 1953.
Heinrich, Bernd. Bumblebee Economics Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Sanford, Dr. Malcolm T., Professor and Apiculturist, University of Florida, 1996.Provided by the Pelotes Island Nature Preserve
http://pelotes.jea.com