Thanks to the tens of thousands of bees, a stable honey-bee hive operates like well-oiled cogs, each bee dedicated to its job. A honeybee’s life is all work and no play. As soon as a honeybee hatches, and until its last breath, a honeybee works endlessly. Operating as a team, bees produce a workforce capable of pollinating thousands of acres of flowering plants, often times producing more than 100 pounds of honey each year, and constantly rearing more bees to replace those lost during the season.
Each bee in a hive has a role. The nurse honeybees nurture and feed bee larvae. They take on the job of processing incoming nectar, feeding the queen, and making and capping honey stores. Undertaker honeybees are tasked with carrying out the hive’s dead, cleaning up bee parts, and removing other debris from the hive.
Architect honeybees are involved with the tasks of repairing and building the hive. As young bees age their wax glands mature and then they are able to secrete wax to contribute to the task of building comb. Wax-producing bees are also required to ripen honey cells. Bees in this category repair and fill cracks in the hive with “propolis,” a sticky substance that bees collect from tree resin.
The cleaners, organizers, and honey makers remain in the hive to collect pollen and nectar from returning bees, packing it into cells, and storing it away for later use. They also process raw materials to produce honey, fanning the product to reduce moisture content ultimately creating the honey we are familiar with.
The breadwinners of the hive are the forager honeybees which develop a venom-filled stinger as they mature. Once the honeybee is mature, they can leave the hive to fulfill their roles as foragers. These bees are entrusted with scouring a distance of up to 3 miles from the hive for appropriate nectar and pollen. Once a forager bee has a full stomach, they return to the hive to hand off their gathered nectar to other honeybees for honey processing. Foraging bees not only act as food collectors for the colony, but also as sensory units formed by natural selection to collect data on the location and viability of foraging sites. Once a suitable site is found the bees engage in a waggle dance sharing direction to the site to other bees.
The bees that protect the hive are appropriately named guards. These are worker bees that developed mature stingers as their means of offensive protection. The guard’s role is to protect the hive’s entrance keeping out unnecessary intruders to the best of their capabilities.
The bee which bears the most burden and important responsibility is the queen bee. Her job is to make sure that the population will thrive in the future, laying as many as 2,000 eggs per day. Due to the nature of her tasks, she outlives all the bees in her hive. Lastly, we have the drones. These bees only have one task, to mate with other young queen bees to spread their healthy genes.
Bee Communication
Honeybees are known to be social creatures. They communicate to work together as a team ensuring their hive’s longevity. Their means of communication involve the use of movement, odor cues, and even food exchanges to share information.
Dancing
To inform other workers of the location of an appropriate place for foraging, honeybee workers execute a sequence of dance movements called the waggle dance. When a honeybee forages, they look for a suitable place to gather raw materials from plants, and upon locating one they return to their hive and perform a dance that provides direction to other bees where to forage.
Honeybees often use two variants of the waggle dance to lead others and bring food supplies closer to home. A series of narrow circle motions, the “round dance”, alerts members of the colony to the possibility of food within 50 meters of the hive. This dance just communicates the direction, not the distance, of the supply. The “sickle dance”, a crescent-shaped movement pattern, alerts workers to the availability of raw materials within 50-150 meters from the hive.
Odor Cues
The queen bee uses pheromones to communicate specific messages and interact with all bees in the hive. There is a continuous flood of contact from the queen and her assistants. Sending the queen’s pheromones out through the hive in a ripple effect, through the sense of touch.
Uniquely, pheromones also play a vital role in the bees’ defense. There is a release of pheromones when a worker honeybee stings, which alerts her fellow workers to the threat. That is why, if a honeybee colony is disrupted, a clumsy attacker can experience multiple stings.
Food
The constant and fundamental part of cooperation is food sharing. When a honeybee is hungry, they go to a forager to ask permission for a “break” from their task, and then they are immediately provided with food. Food moves rapidly through the hive, that is why it will only take 48 hours for any foreign substance/particles to circulate around the hive.
Mating
A queen bee and drone bee are the only bees with fully developed reproductive systems. The queen bee generally mates with 10-15 drones (male honeybees) in flight. Mating typically lasts about 5 to 20 minutes. In the mating process the queen flies to an area where hundreds of male honeybees might be waiting, which is called the “drone congregation area.” The queen will then be mounted by 8 to 12 male drones who insert their endophallus to ejaculate sperm. A male honeybee pulls away from the queen after ejaculation, even though his endophallus is ripped from his body and stays bound to the newly fertilized queen.
Following ejaculation, the next male honeybee to mate with the queen will remove the previous endophallus and ultimately lose his own after mating. On a mating flight, male honeybees are only able to mate 7 to 10 times and each drone dies soon after mating, as his abdomen rips open when its endophallus is cut.
The mating process delivers to the queen a sufficient amount of spermatozoon in the spermatheca to last the queens entire life. The queen once fertilized can lay two types of eggs – one being fertilized and one non-fertilized. The fertilized eggs grow into females and comprise the bulk of the bees in the hive and the non-fertilized grow into males.
Requeening a Hive
Requeening pertains to replacing a queen with another queen. In other words, you’re demoting the current queen out of her throne and the hive where she lives. Then, another queen bee is introduced to take the place of the prior queen. This is an important step for beekeepers in managing the hive and should be taken into consideration every 1-2 years.
One might consider this process when a queen’s productivity decreases due to age compared to the capacity of a younger queen. To retain strong colonies, knowledgeable beekeepers often substitute a queen every one or two years for strong production purposes. As queens often age their egg-laying production and pheromone capacity may wane. High levels of queen pheromones tend to play a role in avoiding swarms, so some beekeepers prefer to keep fairly young queens in swarming colonies.
Worker temperament is another common cause for requeening. Requeening from different stocks will solve the problem if a queen develops temperamental offspring that are aggressive and territorial.
There are two ways for a beekeeper to perform the process of requeening, direct and indirect.
Direct Requeening
Direct requeening is done when a beekeeper naturally releases the new queen bee immediately into the hive. There is a major risk in doing this as the guards of the hive might kill a new foreign queen bee, because they will see it as a threat that must be eliminated. That is why this process is less recommended to use.
Indirect Requeening
Indirect requeening of beehives is safer compared to direct. Since the queen is introduced to the hive slowly and indirectly, giving the hive occupants time to become familiar with the new queen.
If a beekeeper is raising a queen bee on his/her own, they would fashion a cage for the queen bee. This looks like a large clamp wherein the queen bee will be put between the frames. When this is accomplished, the queen bee in the clamp is put down inside the hive so that new hatchlings will be familiar with the new queen before the beekeeper releases the queen
If a beekeeper doesn’t have a new home-grown queen bee, he/she can consider buying one. The queen bee will most likely to come in a box with possibly a few attendants that will be placed in the hive. Before putting her in the hive, there will be a cork in this package that the beekeeper will remove. Behind the cork will reside a candy plug. The candy plug will attract the bees to the gage box where they will feed upon by the plug and thereby remove it. The feeding process generally takes a few days. After the candy plug is removed the queen is free and the hive will have already acclimated to her presence and she is accepted or welcomed into the hive.
