STUFF YOU MIGHT FIND INTERESTING
HONEY BEE CASTES
Three castes of the honey bee:
-
Workers—Worker honey bees usually are non-reproductive females. They do all the work in the hive, and they control most of what goes on inside. Their jobs include housekeeping, feeding the queen, drones and larvae, collecting the pollen and nectar, and making the wax.
-
Queens—Honey bee queens are the reproductive females of the species. They can lay up to 2,500 a day. Each egg is either fertilized to turn into a worker, or unfertilized which will become drones. She is attended by a circle of bees, called a retinue who groom, water and feed her.
-
Drones—Drones are stingless male honey bees that are only present in the spring. Their head, eyes and thorax are significantly larger than those of the females. They are unable to feed without assistance from worker bees and do nothing within the hive. A drone's only role is to mate with an unfertilized queen from a different colony.
FROM EGG TO ADULT BEE
Stages of new brood:
-
A queen lays a fertilized* egg in an open and clean (it must be spotless!) cell. The egg itself resembles an small grain of rice (only 1mm long). Eggs are often hard to see in the hive because it stands up on one end.
-
After 3 days the egg then hatches into a larva and begins to look like a grub worm curled up in the bottom of the cell. The worker (nursery) bees will feed it royal jelly for a few days to jump start their growth. Afterward, they are fed honey and pollen. (Queen larva are fed royal jelly exclusively, which is what turns the same egg/larva into a queen.) The larva eats constantly and therefore grows quickly, shedding its skin five times during this stage.
-
Around day 10, when the larva is fully grown and 1,500 times their original size, the workers will cap the cell with wax.
-
The larva then spins a cocoon and develops into a pupa. At this stage It will begin to take on its familiar bee shape developing legs, wings, and eyes; and finally their hair and coloring.
-
About a week into the pupal stage the fully formed adult bee chews its way through the cap of wax and emerges.
*Worker and queen bees are raised from a fertilized egg. Drones form from an unfertilized egg that is deposited in a different, larger cell. Both Queen and drone lifecycles differ by stage and duration.
MASON BEE VS. HONEY BEE
What's with the tubes?
Since keeping bees, obviously I am now hyper aware of all things bee related. Lately I have been intrigued by articles or ads for bee houses that have long tubes. And it makes me scratch my head because my world revolves around big boxes and frames. Not tubes.
So I did some googling. And to my amazement, these tubes are for Mason bees. Mason bees are similar to honey bees in that they are instrumental in the pollination of all kinds of plants. In fact, these bees are highly sought after for orchards in particular as they are 3x better pollinators, and are especially adept at cross-pollination! They also make great backyard bees given their extreme gentle nature.
DIFFERENCES WITH HONEY BEES:
-
They are solitary - they are not part of a colony so therefore do not swarm, and all females are fertile and build their own nests.
-
They are super pollinators and are very good at pollinating trees
-
They don't make honey!
-
They can, but rarely, sting.
-
They nest in tubes rather than hives.
-
The females lay eggs and then create a cocoon around the egg and collected pollen. They build out the tubes horizontally separating the cocoons with a mud barrier.
-
They can tolerate more extreme temperatures than a honey bee and are the first to emerge in spring.
-
They don't fly more than a few hundred feet from their nest vs. a honey bee that can travel miles aways from the hive.
-
They are varroa mite resistant
For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee
TYPE OF BEE HIVES
Two main types of bee hives:
-
Langstroth: These are the typical bee hives most people are used to seeing. They comprise of rectangular boxes that stack on top of one another allowing the bees to move vertically from box to box. They have a removable top cover and (usually) the only entrance for the bees is on the bottom board. The hive boxes contain 9-10 frames that start with a plastic foundation (template) coated in a thin layer of wax. The bees then draw out the comb with wax to make the individual cells to house pollen, nectar/honey and the brood.
-
Top Bar: These are becoming more and more popular with beekeepers, especially in more urban areas. In these hives. Unlike Langstroth, they are frameless, horizontal hives where bees build and hang freeform comb off of top bars. One con of the top Baar hive is, since the bars are frameless, the entire comb needs to be removed in order to extract honey.
MATRIARCH OF THE COLONY
All about the top bee:
-
A queen starts out like a worker: from a fertilized egg laid by a mated queen. The difference is the queen egg is laid in a much bigger, specialized cell (called "queen cups") and are fed only royal jelly during her larval stage. The time from egg to adult queen is 16 days vs 24 for a worker.
-
Adult queens are larger than the other bees in the colony, with a more tapered abdomen. Like workers they have barbed stingers though a bit smoother. A queen can, if need be, sting multiple times and does not kill her to do so.
-
One of the first things a new queen does is to kill any other queen and/or queen larvae within the hive.
-
A few days after emerging, the virgin queen will leave the hive for her mating flights, mating with up to 20 drones from different colonies. Mating with drones* outside her own hive ensures genetic diversity and helps her brood with disease resistance. This will be the only time she mates in her life and will store up to 100 million sperm within her oviducts.
-
Once mated, the queen starts laying up 1,000-2,000 eggs a day (about one every 43 seconds!) and can produce over 1 million offspring in her life.
-
Queens are the longest living bee in the colony and can live two to five years. Most beekeepers will requeen a hive at least every other year to ensure a productive hive year to year.
(*Drones die immediately after mating.)
