Honeybees Biology for the 5-14 Curriculum

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Honeybees, latin name Apis mellifera, are a type of small animal characterized by a hard external skeleton, three body sections, six legs, a single pair of antennae, wings, and compound eyes.This makes them Insects. The Insecta (insects) are a Class of the large animal Phylum called ARTHROPODA (Arthropods) - a name that refers to their jointed limbs. Insects include grasshoppers, true bugs, beetles, butterflies, moths, true flies, ants, bees and wasps.

Honeybee Lifecycle

Honeybees form large permanent colonies of anywhere between 25000 - 60000 individuals. They spend the spring and summer months collecting nectar and pollen to maintain the nest, feed young brood and to store enough honey to last the colony throughout the cold winter months.

Eggs are laid in wax comb cells by the queen from early spring until late summer. The queen has the ability to lay male or female eggs as she or the colony requires. Once the eggs hatch into Larvae they are fed by nurse bees until ready for pupation a which point the cells containing the Pupae are sealed over. Once metamorphosis is complete the newly formed young bee breaks out of its cell in its Mature Form ready to take over the role of the nurse.

From the time of egg laying a queen takes 16 days to emerge, workers take 21 days, and drones 24.

Honeybee Society

The social structure within the colony is an important part of their success, acting together as one, allocating specific tasks to the workers in order to maintain nest security, structure, brood production, health and hygiene, food collection, swarming and queen replacement.

The colony consists of three castes:

• workers (sterile females)
• drones (non stinging males)
• a queen

The workers do all the house keeping and food collection while the males serve only to fertilise the queen and die or are killed by the workers after doing so, probably to conserve food supplies in the hive. The queen, fertilised by the drones, lays eggs in prepared cells from the early spring to late summer and will continue doing so for around 3-4 years or until the colony decide that she is becoming weak and decide to replace her. Swarming occurs when the nest becomes overcrowded and the old queen takes off to a new location with the mature flying bees after ensuring a new queen is on the way.

Honeybee Diet

Honeybees feed on the nectar and pollen produced by flowers. Nectar is a sugary liquid secreted by special parts of the flower called nectaries. It is produced by the flowers to attract insects, such as honeybees, to the flower to feed on it. As they do so, they pick up grains of pollen on their body hairs, and these are transferred to the next flower which the bees visits. This transfer of pollen is essential in order for the flower to produce seeds, but many flowers produce far more pollen than they need for this purpose. This excess pollen is also gathered by the bees for food.

The nectar gathered from flowers by foraging bees is transferred on arrival at the hive to other bees in the colony that convert and store it as honey. Honey is comprised primarily of fructose and glucose. It has a very high sugar concentration and because of this it kills most bacteria by crenation ( a sort of critical dehydration) . Natural airborne yeasts cannot become active in it because the moisture content is too low. Natural honey varies from 14% to 18% moisture content and as long as the moisture content remains under 18%, virtually no organism can successfully multiply to significant amounts in honey.

Pollen is stored in vacant cells around the brood cells, packed tightly in by the bees with a little honey added to help preserve the pollen. The pollen is stored adjacent to the eggs and larvae because it will mostly be needed to feed to those larvae as they grow.

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