Seriously! If you would like to learn how to inseminate honey bee queens, workshops are offered at Washington State University's Bee Lab and at many other locations throughout the US.

Other insects build their nests/homes of materials they collect and sometimes supplement with a secretion such as saliva, but only honey bees excrete their main construction material - wax. Each worker bee has 8 wax glands on the ventral side of her abdomen which start producing wax about 12 days after she emerges as an adult from her pupal cocoon. Her wax production is at its highest for about the next week; then she tends to move onto other duties in the hive.

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.

Beekeeping folklore explained sudden appearance of aggressive behavior in a hive as a change in the genetic makeup of the workers, specifically which drone’s sperm was used to fertilize those worker eggs laid by the queen. It was thought that the queen would fertilize the eggs with the sperm of different drones at different times because she stored those different sperm in layers inside her body, resulting in changes of the worker population over time. Research has shown that

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.

"Hymen" means "membrane" and ptera means "wing", so hymenoptera means membranous wings.

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

Many crops, particularly those crops such as blueberry, cranberry and tomatoes that 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 causes them to be better pollinators for some larger flowers of plants such as the cucurbits (squash, melons, cucumbers). Also bumbles forage earlier and later in the day than most of the honey bees and that better matches when some flowers are

Why are honey bees not useful for pollination in greenhouses and what bees are? Honey bees 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 their nest.

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.

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.

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.

Only one – Apis mellifera.

There are about 12 species in the genus Apis that produce harvestable honey.

Bees keep ¼” to 3/8” spacing between combs and wherever they want corridors. That is known as bee space. If there is a space less than ¼”, they fill it with propolis, but if the beekeeper leaves spaces between frames, hive walls, other woodenware, etc., greater than 3/8", bees build comb to fill it.

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.