Apis mellifera seems to be a species obsessed with efficiency and temporal polyethism is efficient. Why is temporal polyethism so efficient in worker honey bees? Other social insect species and other social animal have division of labor. Some individuals may even perform multiple tasks in their lifetimes. However, A. mellifera raises this to a whole new level by continuing to change physiologically as an adult, after full metamorphosis (egg, larva, pupa, adult stage

Honey bees have taken social behavior to the highest level seen in the animal world. Social cooperation to the Extreme! Honey bees are eusocial, that means not just gregarious or semi social, but fully social. This is social behavior carried to the max! There are benefits to such social behavior: survival of the species, protection from predators, etc. Whenever Apis mellifera takes on a project, they show themselves to be masters of efficiency. Look at the geometry and

7 out of 8 swarms are expected to not survive their first winter unless captured and rehived by a beekeeper. A few beekeepers in rural or outlying areas feel feel to let their hives swarm each year, for at least 2 reasons. First, this means that their hive will requeen itself each year with a young robust queen. Second, those swarms are just "returning to nature," right? Wrong, it's basically a death sentence unless that swarm is rehived by a beekeeper. For more about f

Most 'feral' swarms are escapees from managed hives. The closer you are to commercial apiaries and to the high density of hobby beekeepers in the Puget Sound area, the more likely you are to capture another beekeeper's swarm. Free bees is good, right? Not always. If the beekeeper was not managing hives well, feeding if needed, and treating for mites, those free bees may not be a reproductive swarm but may be absconding from unsurvivable conditions: hunger or Varroa levels so

The European honey bee, aka the Western honey bee, aka Apis mellifera, aka our beloved honey bee, evolved with European plants over millennia, so it should not surprise us that it pollinates them so well. Many of our favorite foods we brought from the Old World and also many weeds, often plants we now consider invasives. It makes sense that honey bees pollinate those better than natives. Some of the invasives are important pollen or nectar sources at various times of the year

Dr. Samuel Ramsey showed this feeding on adults as well as on bee larvae in the capped stage and presented his research in the youtube presentation: Varroa feed on Fat Body - lecture at the INIB honey show 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2plL5NIRcw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2plL5NIRcw This means that Varroa do not have a "phoretic stage" when they are attached to adult honey bees because a phoretic stage does not include feeding on the host used as transpo

Until recently, it was widely published that V. destructor fed on the hemolymph ("bee blood") of capped bee larvae as they metamorphosed into adults. Under the wax capping of the pupal stage, the Varroa females feed on the bee larvae and lay their eggs which develop, mature and mate before the newly formed adult bees emerge. However, it is not the "blood" of the larvae on which the Varroa feed, but on the fat bodies of the larvae. The Varroa insert their mouthparts into

Once Apis mellifera returns to brood raising after its winter brood break, the workers must maintain temps in the low 90s F to keep eggs, larvae and pupae alive. An Apis mellifera colony maintains its body temp in winter, not going into hibernation or dormancy or lowering body temp to survive, but staying active and actually generating and holding heat with a clustering behavior unknown in other insects. At the center of the cluster, the queen must be kept close to 68-70 deg

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