HONEY BEE
CLASSIFICATION
Domain : - Eukaryote
Kingdom : - Animalia
Phylum : - Arthropoda
Class : - Insecta
Order : - Hymenoptera
Genus : - Apis
Species : - indica
Habitat
Honey bees originated in Tropical Africa and spread from there to Northern Europe and East into Asia. It is also called the Western honey bee. Honey bees are highly colonial and polymorphic insects. They have best developed social life. It is originally an inhabitant of hills, but now occurs in plains also. Honey Bees live in a nest, called a "hive." Hive hangs vertically from trees, buildings and rocks. A single hive can have up to 80,000 bees, mostly workers.
General Characteristics
The honeybee is about 12 mm (1/2 inch) long and dark brown and black, densely hairy body with 3 or 5 dark brown abdominal bands. They carry two pairs of wings which are membranous and have few veins. Bees have six legs, a pair of elbowed antennae, compound eyes, jointed legs, and a hard exoskeleton. The three body parts are the head, thorax, and abdomen (the tail end). The head, antennae, and legs are black. The head is mobile and bears three ocelli and lapping mouth parts. Bees can fly about 24 kph.
There are three types of honey bees: - the queen, workers and drones - males which develop parthenogenetically. Drones mate with the queen and then they die.
Queen bee :- The hive is ruled over by a queen bee. She is the largest bee having a large body with tapering abdomen and reduced mouth parts. She is the only fertile female to mate and her only work is to lay eggs and she is mother of almost entire colony.
Worker bees: - Most bees are workers which are sterile females. They develop from fertilized eggs. They have a stout. broad body with very large eyes, powerful wings and feeble mouth parts. The workers do all of the work inside and outside of the hive. They have chewing and lapping type of mouth parts.
They are further divided into tree major groups: - scavenger bees, nurse bees, field bees. Worker bees of a certain age will secrete beeswax from a series of glands on their abdomen. They use the wax to form the walls and caps of the comb. Their jobs include: caring for larvae (baby bees, cleaning up the hive, storing pollen, making honey, guarding the hive, collecting pollen and nectar. Workers cooperate to find food and use a pattern of "dancing" (known as the bee dance or waggle dance) to communicate with each other. When a bee finds a good place with lots of flowers, she marks the spot with a scent. She then goes back to the hive and does a little "dance" which tells the other bees the distance and direction to go. This communication helps the hive locate good places so they don't waste time always looking for flowers.
Honey bees can sting, all honey bees live in colonies where the workers will sting intruders if they, or the hive, are in danger, and alarmed bees will release a pheromone that stimulates the attack response in other bees. The stinger is attached to a venom gland in the abdomen. The sting apparatus has its own musculature and ganglion. Muscle attached to the venom gland continues to pump poison into the wound, even after the bee is gone.
Reproduction
Virgin queens go on mating flights away from their home colony, and mate with multiple drones before returning. The drones die in the act of mating. The queen lays eggs which become either males, workers, or new queens, depending on the time of year and the age of the hive. Eggs are laid singly in a cell in a wax honeycomb, produced and shaped by the workers. The egg hatches into a worm-like larva. Larvae are initially fed with royal jelly produced by worker bees, later switching to honey and pollen. The exception is a larva fed solely on royal jelly, which will develop into a queen bee. Bees undergo complete metamorphosis. The larva undergoes several moulting before spinning a cocoon within the cell, and pupating and hatch out as adult bees.
After old queen makes new queens and the colony becomes overcrowded, she will leave the nest with some workers to start a new hive. The first new queen will kill all the others, and then she will be the queen of the old hive.
Nutrition
Larvae eat honey. Honey is the complex substance made when the nectar and sweet deposits from plants and trees are gathered, modified and stored in the honeycomb. The worker bee drinks as much nectar as she can hold. When she gets back to the hive, she passes the nectar on to another worker. This worker holds the nectar on her tongue until the water evaporates (leaves the nectar to go back into the air). She is left with honey on her tongue, which is stored in the hive. Bees eat their store of honey in the winter, when there is no food. Queen bees eat royal jelly. Royal jelly is a paste made by worker bees. Worker bees eat nectar and pollen from flowers. Nectar is a sweet liquid made by flowers, and pollen is a powdery substance which must be transferred from one flower to another to make more flowers. In the hive, pollen is used as a protein source necessary during brood-rearing.
Economic Importance
Honey bees visit many different types of flowers, including clover, dandelions, goldenrod, fruit trees, and milkweed. In the process of going from flower to flower to collect nectar, pollen from many plants gets stuck on the bee's pollen baskets (hairs on the hind legs). Pollen is also rubbed off of flowers. This pollinates many flowers (fertilizing them and producing seeds).Honey bees provide bee wax that is used in making candles, polishes, toilet goods, cosmetics, electric goods, carbon paper, etc.Their sting is poisonous and sometimes fatal to man when they attack in large numbers. Rearing of honey bees to obtain honey and bee wax is called apiculture.
