It is believed that worker bees don’t sleep until they are foraging age. Until then they are cleaning, nursing the brood, tending the queen, heating the hive, warming the brood, processing the nectar and pollen gathered during the day and distributing food to all hive residents. No wonder they have no time to sleep! However, eventually the worker bee body has aged and changed to foraging after passing through a progression of the duties throughout her life. Those duties chang

If the honey bee queen can lay over 1000 eggs per day during spring and summer when the hive is most populous and most active, the bees from those eggs must die at a similar rate some weeks later. Why do you not see that many dead bees per day in or near the hive? Worker bees only live about 6 or 7 weeks in spring or summer so 100s of bees must be dying every day! However, bees have very hygienic behaviors. One of these is that any bee that dies in the hive is removed by the

Throughout the world, people eat insects in their egg, larval, pupal or adult stages, a behavior known as entomophagy. However, the only insect that produces a food that it eats and that humans consume as well, are the honey bees.

Studies of the brain of a honey bee, only about a cubic millimeter in volume, yield valuable information in medical research, information that can improve our brain health and our lives. The honey bee brain has the highest neuropile density of any animal. How can research on an insect brain be useful in human medicine? We use an animal model such as the honey bee, simpler in some ways and yet more focused, to understand perception, information processing, learning, etc.

Bees are fuzzy, not just covered by hairs, but covered by plumose (branched) hairs which trap particulates. This trait aids their collection of pollen and its transfer from flower to flower. However, these feathery hairs of foraging honey bees (and other bees) also trap wind-borne particulates in flight, making them ideal for the study ­­of air pollutant particles.

“Mad honey" is honey from the nectar of certain plants, particularly the Ericaceae family, which includes rhododendron, pieris and other genera that might sound familiar to gardeners. Symptoms of poisoning by ingesting this honey include dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, hypersalivation, nausea, vomiting and paresthesia, cardiac complications and possibly death. However, in the United States, honey bees have other sources of forage and rarely collect the nectar of

Worker bee life span during summer may only be 7 weeks, about 4 of them flying. During the winter some of the workers live 5 months or more. Drones live only one season if they fail to mate. If they mate, they die in the act. Queens have been shown to sometimes live for years but the average life span of queens appears to be decreasing.

By volume, weight, or space occupied on frames. The size or weight difference between strains of honey bees – Italian, Russian, Carniolan, Caucasian - is minimal. So a half cup of bees is about 300, a pound is about 3500 and a densely covered deep frame is 1500 or more.

Normally there is only one and she will battle with any other queen intruding or introduced into the hive in a stinging to the death duel. However, in large hives, particularly during the spring, beekeepers see more than one. Sometimes it is thought that the mother queen is being superseded by her daughter queen and eventually disappears. It may be that she duels with her daughter or that the workers eliminate her. The other time more than one queen can be found in a hiv

Yes, if the bee that stings is a worker bee, she will die shortly after stinging because the sting assembly separates from her body leaving an open wound. The sting assembly includes the stinger shaft, the glands and the muscles that pump the venom through the stinger. A queen bee survives after stinging and may sting repeatedly because her stinger is less barbed, allowing her to withdraw it without injury to her body.

The stinger should be removed as soon as possible by scraping it out, such as by using a finger nail or credit card. Squeezing the stinger, and attached venom pouch, may cause the release of more venom in to the skin. Do not continue to scrape or irritate the sting area because you may actually push bacteria on the skin surface into the sting wound and start an infection. One particular potentially troublesome bacteria found on normal skin is Staphylococcus aureus, comple

Bees secrete an anesthetic, 2-heptanone, from their mandibular glands. When guard bees break through the outer body covering of intruders, this secretion can enter the intruder’s body and cause temporary paralysis.

The armor of a bee is in overlapping segments. The abdomen of the bee has one row of rigid overlapping plate on its dorsal side (back) and another set on its ventral side (belly). Each dorsal plate segment overlaps its ventral counterpart. Each piece is rigid but joined by membranes allowing what we see as flexible movement, in this case “panting.”.

Bees can not pant; they don’t have lungs. However, bees do have membranes in their abdomen that act as diaphragms and aid in the flow of hemolymph inside their body, and aid in the movement of air through tracheal tubes and air sacs.

They hear with the subgenual organs on all 6 legs as well as Johnston’s organs on the antennae. Their brains processing the sensory input from that many receptive organs on the 6 legs would probably give them the direction of a vibration source, and therefore of “sound”. However, a bee’s brain comparing the vibrations received by the Johnston’s organs of the two separate antennae is probably the easiest way to think of them as perceiving the direction of sound, much as we us

Two ways: from the production and consumption of bee bread and from the jelly fed to them by young bees at the jelly producing stage of their progression in duties, polyethism. This is the stage at which those young adults mix the secretions of their hypopharyngeal and mandibular glands, varying the secretion mix according to whether they are feeding larvae, queen, drones or workers. Bee bread is the other way that older larvae and adults get their protein. The bees fer

All castes (worker, queen, drone) emit pheromones. The tarsal gland secretion mentioned in a previous post also contains a trail pheromone, which workers leave on the forage they visit or at the hive entrance. This pheromone helps workers home in on the forage they may have found following the instructions of a waggle dance back at the hive. Returning to the hive, those foragers may again receive the homing signal of that pheromone at the hive entrance, along with others.

The 2 claws or hooks on each pretarsus (end segment of each leg), grip rough or penetrable surfaces so that makes it easy to move anywhere on those surfaces, including upside down. On slippery surfaces, a flexible pad between those 2 claws forms a sort of “suction” against those smooth surfaces with a secretion from a gland called the Arnhart or tarsal or arolium gland.

Adult bees can consume nectar directly but nectar is basically sugar water, plant sugar, but is almost completely carbohydrates. Just as every animal needs protein, so do all the bees in the hive. The protein is in the pollen. Bees are extremely efficient gatherers and storers of pollen. So what’s the problem with bees directly consuming pollen? There are obstacles: a “wasp waist”, the design of a bee’s gut, and the structure of pollen itself. Bee larvae don’t develop th

Well, actually those secretions from various glands of the young worker bees are mixed into different forms of “royal jelly”. The queen is fed one form, worker larvae another, drone larvae a slightly different form and so on. Even adults such as returning foragers receive some of this jelly as a “reward” from the young adult nurse or house bees.