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.

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...