Honey Bees, Apis mellifera
All honey bees are social and cooperative insects. A hive's inhabitants are generally divided into three types.
Workers are the only bees that most people ever see. These bees are females that are not sexually developed.
Workers forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean, circulate air by
beating their wings, and perform many other societal functions.
The queen's job is simple—laying the eggs that will spawn the hive's next generation of bees. There is usually
only a single queen in a hive. If the queen dies, workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the worker
females a special diet of a food called "royal jelly." This elixir enables the worker to develop into a fertile queen.
| Honey Bee |
| Habitat: |
Woodland, gardens and orchards |
| Development: |
Complete metamorphosis |
| Food: |
Herbivore |
| Flight Period: |
Spring through fall |
| Description: |
Orange and brown-colored, rather hairy. The
abdomen is black with orange transverse stripes of varying width. |
| Length: |
0.47 to 0.79 inches |
| Wingspan: |
1 inch |
Bees live on stored honey and pollen all winter, and cluster into a ball to conserve warmth.
XXX-Rated: Honey Bee Sex
Honey Bee Breeds & Their Features
Drone Honey Bees: The Ectasy and The Agony
Honey Bee Communication: Pheromones
Honey Bee Communication: Waggle Dance
Drones do little around the hive, they don't clean or build honey combs and they help
themselves to nectar stores. Yet they don’t do much to help out with the kids. Heck, they don’t
even go out and get food for the colony!
Take this quick quiz and see how much you know about Bumble Bees—our favorite essential pollinators
working around the world. This quiz is intended for fun, in a random-facts-can-be-cool kind of way.
There are many things that a beekeeper needs to see when checking a frame. This article shows
the different kinds of cells that you find in comb and how to read them. Includes a short quiz.