Other insects we may use as food (entomophagy), eating their larvae or adults, but only bees make honey, a food both they and we eat.

Other insects we may use as food (entomophagy), eating their larvae or adults, but only bees make honey, a food both they and we eat.

It makes sense that bees would "hear" the vibrations we call sound waves with their antennae, but "hearing" with their legs? A group, of sensors on the bee's tibia, called the subgenual organ, pick up the vibrations of air and of the substrate on which the bee is standing. Inside the dark hive, bees experience the waggle dance via those vibrations of air and comb through the subgenual organs and the Johnston's organs of the antennae.

One queen at a time is the norm. More than one queen can be seen by the beekeeper if the workers have raised a replacement queen for the existing one, usually because they sense the older queen is failing. Sometimes in the spring, mother and daughter are both in the hive and laying but later in the season, the mother has disappeared. In a different situation, when honey bees are swarming to start a new colony, the original queen leaves before the new queens in cells emer

One queen at a time is the norm. More than one queen can be seen by the beekeeper if the workers have raised a replacement queen for the existing one, usually because they sense the older queen is failing. Sometimes in the spring, mother and daughter are both in the hive and laying but later in the season, the mother has disappeared. In a different situation, when honey bees are swarming to start a new colony, the original queen leaves before the new queens in cells emer

A. mellifera behavior and movement is studied to understand group behavior, not just in animals, but possibly in ways that could predict human behavior in groups, and also in ways that might be used in robotics. Check out this Georgia Tech video which begins by discussing the waggle dance and then at the very end of this 7 minute youtube video, discusses the connection between bee behavior and robotics. https://youtu.be/bFDGPgXtK-U

The bumble bee Bombus impatiens; it is shipped in small hives, each containing only dozens of bees with one queen and brood, usually for placement in greenhouses.

A worker uses her front pair of legs for many tasks but the front legs are specially designed to clean her antennae with bristles in a notch such that she can pull her antennae past them in order to brush particles off them. It's a built-in antennae cleaner! The arrow in the picture points to the notch into which the bee places her antenna to pull it through and past those bristles. Photo taken from Penn State Beekeeping 101 course.

Individual bees are cold blooded. At about 42 degrees F, bees can't move because their muscles are not warm enough, per The Beekeeper's Handbook , 5th ed., 2021, Diana Sammataro & Alphonse Avitabile. However, the colony as a whole is a warm-blooded superorganism. Bees in winter cluster can keep the queen at 68-70 degrees F in subzero temperatures and when the colony starts to raise brood at the end of winter, the colony must keep its core temperature around the brood at

Only Apis mellifera and Apis cerana nest in cavities with sufficient population to be easily managed for honey harvest. A. florea and others nest in cavities but not in large enough colonies to make regular tending and honey harvest practical. Apis cerana colonies are much smaller, perhaps one-quarter the size of Apis mellifera, so they yield a much smaller honey harvest per colony. Photo above is of an Apis cerana managed colony in the trunk of a coconut tree. photo by

Photo: Cucurbits such as the cucumbers pictured above can produce 70% more when 'buzz pollinated' by bumble bees. See the difference in fruit set between the two cucumbers sliced open above. Many crops, particularly those crops such as blueberry, cranberry cucurbits and tomatoes are best pollinated by “buzz pollination,” which a number of solitary bees such as bumbles do, but not honey bees. The size and shape of bumble bodies plus buzz pollination causes them to be bet

Why are honey bees not useful for pollination in greenhouses, and what bees are? Honey bees would come out of their hive and fly up and away from the crops in the greenhouses to forage over an area of at least several square miles. Bumble bees naturally fly much lower and “bumble” around inside the greenhouse because they naturally forage a few hundred feet at most from the nest established by each queen. The photo is of a shipment of bumble bee queens in their nests fo

It changed its behavior in two major ways from the other Apis species that never moved out of the tropics. (1) it stored enough surplus honey to survive the winter dearth and (2) it developed an advanced clustering behavior to keep the queen alive through cold winters. Photo above is of Apis mellifera nestled in a rock cavity in Arizona building up its surplus honey stores. From World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting , Eva Crane.

There are about 12 species in the genus Apis that produce harvestable honey, however only a few species produce a commericially adequate harvest. Apis mellifera is the largest honey producer and the only of those bee species to be cultivated outside Asia. The other Apis species all remain confined to Asia. The photo above from James C. Nieh of Researchgate, shows the 'out in the open', single-comb nest strategy of Apis dorsata. This works in the tropics, but confines this spe

Only one – Apis mellifera developed and refined eusociality to the level necessary to survive in the seasonally adverse conditions found in such areas as the northern temperate zone. Photo: hives in Maltby Apiary, SnoKing Beekeepers Association, Maltby, Washington, USA

Drones, which have no stingers, and worker bees that have stung a person, animal or object and their stingers have detached from their bodies. Those workers die soon after.

The bees use propolis to keep their nest water and draft proof by filling cracks, holes, gaps less than 6mm in width. They limit entrance size by filling the opening with propolis and often block any alternate entry openings. They also use propolis to seal or encapsulate anything they can not remove from a hive, be it mold, microbes, or small dead animals.

The workers forage to collect plant resins, bring it back to the hive and mix it with wax and possibly with their saliva. Conifers, maples, the poplar family, including our native cottonwoods, and other resinous plants., provide ample sources in Western Washington. Picture of propolis with uses inside the beehive taken from a review article in the journal Insects, "Propolis Counteracts Some Threats to Honey Bee Health" Michael Simone-Finstromet. al.

The corbiculae (singular: corbicula), often called pollen baskets. Here's a picture of a bee with light yellow filbert pollen pellets on her corbiculae.

Why do beekeeping instructors recommend a beginning beekeeper start with a minimum of two colonies? Starting with two bee nucs or packages, and not one, enables a beginner to compare the progress of two colonies, and to judge better if one is encountering a problem. Many problems can be resolved by adding resources – feed, a boost of a frame of brood from another colony, etc. By comparing the two, a beginner has a better chance of realizing that one colony has a problem in ti