Pollen and propolis.

The corbiculae (singular: corbicula), often called pollen baskets.

The 2nd pair of legs have tibial spurs. Those are used to pierce the wax flakes produced by the wax glands (on the abdomen) and pass them to the mandibles or perhaps to another worker to add them to comb being built.

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 configuration such that she can pull her antennae past them in order to brush particles off them. It's a built-in antennae cleaner!

At any time moving around the hive at any angle, including completely upside down, the bee has a minimum of 3 legs in contact with a surface at any time giving maximum stability in any position a bee takes while completing her tasks. Any pair of legs can be used for specialized tasks while the bee’s body is secured by the tarsal hooks of at least 3 legs still in contact with the surface or hanging onto other bees’ bodies, as when grouping to make wax comb, sometimes called “f

Humans and bees both have jointed legs, and some of the parts making mobility possible share names in both species: femur, tibia, tarsus (plural, tarsi), trochanter, coxa. In the human body, the femur, trochanter and coxa are fused, whereas in a honey bee, they are distinguishable parts, which makes sense, given that bee legs have more functions than just support and mobility!

Although in English we call her the queen, she does not play the role of a traditional monarch, and many languages call her "mother." Instead, she is the mother of the hive; she lays eggs and her presence holds the hive together socially, largely by the pheromones she and her developing offspring emit. As any beekeeper knows, the colony of bees loses its focus and strength when the queen is absent, just as when a family is without a mother. In any colony, most decisions are

“You are what you eat.” The worker bees nursing the female larvae decide what diet to feed each larvae from the time the egg hatches. The diet that produces a worker differs in components such as proteins, hormones, sugars and other nutrients in types and amounts from the diet fed to a larvae chosen by the workers to become a queen. The future queen receives only "royal jelly" from her hatching as an egg to the end of her royal life. Logically, the hive needs many workers bu

No, when bees carry nectar or honey, it travels down their esophagus to the honey crop (stomach) where the proventriculus prevents it from entering the digestive stomach. This proventriculus structure allows them to carry liquid and regurgitate it without digesting it, so nectar and honey need never be “barfed” or “vomited.”

Drones need more time to get so much larger than workers. To attain this growth, they get an extra 3 days to develop as pupae, for a total of 24 days from egg to emergence as an adult, compared to a worker’s mere 21 days of development. Also, they aren’t just larger than workers; some individual drones weigh more than some of the smaller individual queens. Drones can have bodies as wide as or even wider than queens, particularly in the abdomen, even though they are not as lo

So, we know that queens are the largest caste of bees in the hive, although some drones are larger than some queens. Per The Beekeeper’s Handbook , 5th ed., 2021, Diana Sammataro & Alphonse Avitabile, queens range in size from 178 to 292 mg at emergence from the queen cell. That's quite a range in size, and maybe after mating and abdominal distension with full development and full utilization of egglaying apparatus, they could weigh even more!

So what’s the weight of a raindrop? We in Western Washington (geographical base of the SnoKing Beekeepers Assn.) know that drops of...

Clearly pounds and ounces aren't going to work, so we have to go metric. A single bee weighs 121 mg, about 1/10 of a gram.

UV, because bees can locate the sun even through the clouds on an overcast day and use that for navigation. Also, because flowers that...

2 compound eyes, 3 simple eyes (ocelli), but each of the compound eyes has 1000s of ommatidia. According to "Honeymaker: How the Honey...