Buzz about the Bees

Honeybees are social insects with a marked division of labour. A colony generally contains one breeding female, or "queen"; 2000 males, or "drones"; and a large population of sterile female “worker” bees. The population of a healthy hive in mid-summer can average between 40,000 and 80,000 bees. The workers cooperate to find food and use a pattern of "dancing" to communicate with each other.
Honeybees live in colonies that are often maintained, fed, and transported by beekeepers. Centuries of selective breeding by human beings have created honeybees that produce far more honey than the colony needs. Beekeepers harvest the honey. Beekeepers provide a place for the colony to live and to store honey in. The modern beehive is made up of a series of square or rectangular boxes without tops or bottoms placed one on top of another. Inside the boxes, frames are hung in parallel, in which bees build up the wax honeycomb in which they both raise brood and store honey. Modern hives enable beekeepers to transport bees, moving from field to field as the crop needs pollination.

Queen

The queen is the largest bee in the colony. Queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees to become sexually mature. The queen develops more fully than sexually immature workers because she is given royal jelly, a secretion from glands on the heads of young workers, for an extended time. She develops in a specially constructed queen cell, which is larger than the cells of normal brood comb, and is oriented vertically instead of horizontally. In each hive or colony, there is only one adult queen, who is the mother of the worker bees of the hive, although there are exceptions on occasion.

Although the name might imply it, a queen has no control over the hive. Her sole function is to serve as the reproducer. She is indeed an "egg laying machine." A good queen of quality stock, well reared with good nutrition and well mated, can lay up to 3,000 eggs per day during the spring build-up and live for two or more years. She lays her own weight in eggs every couple of hours and is continuously surrounded by young worker attendants, who meet all her needs, such as feeding and cleaning.
Drones

The male bees, called “drones”, are characterized by eyes that are twice the size of those of worker bees and queens, and a body size greater than that of worker bees, though usually smaller than the queen bee. Their abdomen is stouter than the abdomen of workers or queen. Although heavy bodied, drones have to be able to fly fast enough to catch up with the queen in flight. Drones are stingless. Their main function in the hive is to be ready to fertilize a receptive queen. The life expectancy of a drone is about 90 days.


Worker Bees

A worker bee is a non-reproducing female, which performs certain tasks in support of a beehive. Worker bees undergo a well-defined progression of capabilities. In the summer, 98% of the bees in a hive are worker bees. In the winter, besides the queen, all bees are worker bees. Workers feed the queen and larvae, guard the hive entrance and help to keep the hive cool by fanning their wings. Worker bees also collect nectar to make honey. In addition, worker bees produce wax comb.

Why Honeybees are Important?

Bees play a central role in our food supply. Crops from nuts to vegetables and as diverse as alfalfa, apple, cantaloupe, cranberry, pumpkin, and sunflower all require pollinating by honeybees. For fruit and nut crops, pollination can be a farmer’s only real chance to increase yield. The extent of pollination determines the maximum number of fruits. Post-pollination inputs, whether growth regulators, pesticides, water, or fertilizer, are actually designed to prevent losses and preserve quality rather than increase yield.

As pollination is so important, farmers cannot depend on feral honeybees that happen to nest near crop fields. That is why farmers invite migratory beekeepers, who move millions of beehives to fields each year just as crops flower. The pollination of our crops is the greatest honeybee contribution. Without their services, many of our crops would not produce fruit or set seed. Although other insects perform this service, honeybees are by far the most numerous and important pollinators. Their large perennial colonies can be moved to wherever they are needed and they can communicate direction and distance from the hive to nectar sources. Honeybees also practice flower fidelity, which makes them very efficient pollinators. Flower fidelity is the habit of concentrating on one specific species of flower when gathering and transferring pollen even though the insect is attracted to a large variety of flowers.

Crops that need the Bees
Apple; blackberry; blueberry; cantaloupe; cherry; clover; cucumber; fruit trees; peach; pear; persimmon; plum; pumpkin; raspberry; squash; and watermelon must be pollinated by bees to produce food yields. Crops that will produce higher yields if visited by bees include: strawberry; soybean; pepper; okra; lima beans; grape and eggplant.

But the bees’ importance goes far beyond agriculture. They also pollinate flowering plant species, ensuring that we have blooms in our gardens. Of course, there are honey and beeswax as well. Honeybees are also excellent at finding the most abundant and sweetest source of nectar near the colony. Scouts communicate information about the source to their brood with what is called “dance language”. Even in the darkness of the hive, the direction in which a bee is dancing can be easily followed by other worker bees and the odour of the nectar that the dancer provides gives the followers a clue as to what kind of flower the dancer has found.

Communicating by Dance
Honeybee dancing, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of their biology, is also one of the most fascinating behaviour in animal life. Performed by a worker bee that has returned to the honeycomb with pollen or nectar, the dances, in essence, constitute a language that “tells” other workers where the food is. By signalling both distance and direction with particular movements, the worker bee uses the dance language to recruit and direct other workers in gathering pollen and nectar.

Furious Bees: Reel not the real image of Bees

Bees are most harmless insects. But media has projected their false image. Bees are shown as aggressive insects in most of the films, comics, and cartoons although they are working tirelessly to offer the sweetest thing to the world: Honey.
All honeybees defend their nest by stinging, and their behaviour ranges from mild to intense. But they sting in greater numbers only on provocation. It is this defensive behaviour that Hollywood has raised to mythic proportions. The average person can survive 1,000 to 1,500 stings (about 10 to 15 stings per pound of body weight), especially if they get medical attention. Fortunately, such massive stinging is rare.

The Vanishing Act

Honeybees are mysteriously vanishing across the countries, putting billion dollars worth of fruits, nuts and vegetables at risk. Apples, cucumbers, broccoli or onions, pumpkins, squash, carrots, blueberries, avocados, almonds, cherries and many other crops cannot grow without honeybees. Baffling disappearance of these hard-working pollinators could put crops at risk –not to mention put a damper on your diet.
In recent years, there has been a drastic and mysterious die-off of honeybee colonies. Beekeepers sounded the alarm about disappearing bees in 2006. Seemingly healthy bees were simply abandoning their hives en masse, never to return. Researchers are calling the mass disappearance –Colony Collapse Disorder, and they estimate that nearly one-third of all honeybee colonies in the US have vanished.
Why are the bees leaving?

Scientists studying the disorder believe that a combination of factors could be making bees sick, including pesticide exposure, invasive parasitic mites, an inadequate food supply and a new virus that targets bees' immune systems. More research is essential to determine the exact cause of the bees' distress.

Bee Friendly, Bee Safe

Protecting honeybees is crucial. You can also help keep bees healthy by making your yard and garden colourful, diverse and pesticide free.

Here are some tips on how you can Bee Safe
•Bee Native: Use local and native plants in your yard and garden. These plants thrive easily and are well suited for local bee populations, providing pollen and nectar for bees to eat.
•Bee Diverse: sow lots of different kinds of plants in your yard. Plant diversity ensures that your garden attracts many different varieties of bees and gives them a range of flowering plants to choose from throughout the year. Make sure your yard plants vary in:
oColour: Bees have good vision and are attracted to several different colours of flowers.
oShape: Different species of bees are better suited for different shapes of flowers. Give your bees some variety!
oFlowering times: Having a sequence of plant species that flower throughout the year helps sustain the food supply and attract different species of bees.
•Bee Open to Pollen: Pollen is bee food. Genetically engineered pollen-free plants trick bees into thinking they will find food, and then leave them hungry. (Don't worry; flower pollen isn't a big contributor to most people's allergies.)
•Bee Pesticide Wary: There are many natural methods to control pests in your garden. Researchers believe that pesticides are a contributing factor to Colony Collapse Disorder. Moreover, some insecticides are harmful to bees and wipe out flowers that provide bees with food. If you must, use targeted pesticides and spray at night –when bees are not active.
•Bee a Hive Builder: Building your own beehive is easy and fun. Creating a wood nest is a good place to start –wood-nesting bees do not sting! Simply take a non-pressure treated block of wood and drill holes that are 3/32 inch to 5/16 inch in diameter and about 5 inches deep and wait for the bees to arrive.

Spread the sweet message…Honey!

It is high time that the people across the world should initiate serious and concerted efforts to save the honeybees. Honeybees are important not only from the perspective of wildlife diversity but also essential for our dietary and olfactory needs. Colony Collapse Disorder leading to large-scale disappearance of the honeybees can adversely affect fruit and flower production if it remains unattended.