Bee caste identification, roles and functions within a colonial beehive.

Bee caste identification, roles and functions within a colonial beehive.

Blog Article

Honey bees build perennial nests from wax to breed and house large colonies of tens of thousands bees and produce and store a surplus of honey.

Bees are domesticated and provided housing by beekeepers in apiaries for the culture of mono floral and multi floral honey, beeswax, propolis resin, pollen bee bread ambrosia and royal jelly

Honey bees are eusocial insects with clear division of labour organized by complex communication with cognitive and sensory processes through pheromones and in flight dances.

The three different castes of bees carry out individual functions and tasks towards the success of the entity of the hive.

• Queen bee is the only female bee in the hive capable of laying eggs.
  - When mature enough to fly out of the hive, a virgin queen will accomplish one or several mating flights in sunny, warm weather to drone congregation areas in nature or open mating in mating yards where she will mate mid air in flight with drones from other colonies only, to receive and store up to 6 million sperm in her spermatheca from twelve to fifteen male bees which she later uses to selectively fertilize the thousands of eggs she will lay for the remaining two to seven years of her life in the hive.
  - Queens fly further away from the hive than drones, limiting inbreeding. Mating with several drones ensures the queen provides increased genetic diversity within a broader genetic pool, disease resistance, colony fitness for foraging and winter survival and hybrid vigour strength to her brood.
  - Each mating flight lasts about 20 minutes and occur up to 8.3 kilometres away from the hive. Bee mating congregation areas are not found closer than 90 m away from an apiary. Congregation areas with greater distances from apiaries receive more drones.
  - The bee queen lays one egg per cell in the part of the wax honeycomb dedicated to brood and can choose to fertilize some eggs and not others by selectively releasing sperm as the egg passes through her oviduct.
  Unfertilized eggs are haploid and develop into male drone bees while fertilized eggs develop into female worker bees and new queens.
  - Larvae selected to become queen bees are specially fed solely royal jelly by nurse bees while worker and drones are fed royal jelly for only three days then switched to a diet of water diluted honey and bee bread, a mixture of pollen and nectar. The queen only eats royal jelly her whole life in larval and adult bee form.
  - Worker bees also construct exclusive queen cells that are peanut like in shape and texture, larger than normal worker and drone brood cells and vertically oriented instead of horizontally to accomodate the larger developing young queen. The special queen cells start out as partially constructed cell cups that worker bees will further build if the colony’s queen lays an egg in the queen cup when conditions for swarming or supersedure are right. If the beehive colony needs an emergency queen, worker bees will modify cells of brood less than three days old into specialized queen cells that will also protrude vertically from the face of the brood comb.
  - When more than one queen exists within a hive, the queen either kills the other queen or queens or swarming occurs where a single original colony splits into two or more new colonies as a natural means of reproduction and survival. Worker bees and a queen swarm en masse away from the natal hive to build and establish a new nest.
  - Queen bees can sting but rarely do. They have a smooth stinger used mostly to kill other queens in the same hive but the stinger lacks barbs so a queen bee can sting animals with skin several times without dying. Getting stung by a queen bee is more potent than worker bees, beekeepers should be careful when handling queens and have queen odour on their hands.


• Worker bees are non reproductive female bees in the hive.
  - Young worker bees are nurse bees, they clean the hive and feed the larvae after the eggs hatch before capping the brood cells in the pupae stage. When their royal jelly producing glands output diminishes, they attend to the queen then begin building honeycomb cells and repairing cells by producing beeswax from honey and progress to other tasks within the colony such as receiver bees to receive foraged material. Wax worker bees process honey and pollen into ambrosia and store them into comb cells with a wax capping. Pollen is mixed with honey to form bee bread for storage because fresh pollen will become rancid. When their stinger is mature worker bees work as guard bees to protect the hive entrance. Later, an older worker bee takes her first orientation flight and finally leaves the beehive to spend the remainder of her life as a forager bee collecting nectar, pollen, plant resin and water and to locate new nest sites as scout bees when the colony has overgrown its nest and is ready to swarm or abscond the whole colony to a new home closer to foraging resources.
  - Worker bees thermoregulate to maintain the hive temperature by warming or cooling as needed and cluster for warmth during winter and to provide crucial heat to travelling swarms. Temperature regulation in the brood chamber is important, in addition to help with honey making. To generate warmth worker bees increase the temperature of their thoracic muscles using isometric contractions then press their muscles again the caps or walls of the brood cells. To cool the hive worker bees collect water or diluted nectar which they deposit around the hive then fan the air with their wings to cause cooling by evaporation.
  - Worker bees typically have a lifespan of 2 to 6 weeks in summer and up to 20 weeks during winter.
  - Worker bees die after stinging as their barbed stinger and venom bulb embeds into the victim and harms the body and internal organs of the bee when detaching into mammals and birds. When bees sting other kinds of animals their stinger are not removed which means the animal can get stung repeatedly. Foraging and scouting worker bees can travel up to 3 km and journey up to 10 times a day with trips lasting an hour.