Overview Of The Behaviour Of Honey Bees
Bees are insects. An insect has 3 main body parts. There’re the head, thorax, and abdomen. An insect has 6 legs. There are so many kinds of bees. I’ll tell you some of them. The honey bee, bumble bee, carpenter bee, and orchid bee. Honey bees have 7, 000 small eyes in each big eye. So the honey bee has 14, 000 small eyes all together!
Bees are social insects. That means they work together as a community. Social means community. Wild bees make their hives in trees or logs. Man-made hives are made of wood straw or pots. Bees gather nectar and pollen. Nectar is the sweet liquid from the flowers. Pollen is the powder on the flower. Bees pollinate flowers. That means they bring pollen to one flower to another. Bees eat only nectar, pollen, and honey, food that bees make with nectar and pollen. Bees smell each other to communicate. The smell is a chemical made from bees. The chemical is called pheromones. There are three kinds of bees, the queen, worker, and drone. The queen is the only bee that lays eggs. The workers don’t lay eggs. They work a lot. I’ll tell you a worker bees job is to clean hive, build comb, make honey, fan wings to cool hive, tend queen, feed baby bees, collect nectar and pollen, and guard entrance. The drone does nothing but mate with the queen when she’s 5 days old. Most bees have a stinger but some bees don’t have one. Bees only sting because people disturb them or someone or something is destroying the hive. A bee can only sting once but a queen bee can sting many times. A bee can sting only once because their stinger has barbs (hooks). The stinger gets stuck and when the bee pulls it out, the stinger stays on the victim and the bee dies. A queen bee is strong enough to pull her stinger out of the victim.
A bee goes to collect some pollen and nectar. When she’s done, she goes back to the hive and does a dance in front of the other bees, then the other bees go to the flowers the first bee went. Bees make wax in their bodies. The wax comes out in the openings under their abdomens. A bee gets the wax from her abdomen and shapes it into tilted up hexagon tubes. Honey is healthy food, but kids younger than 1-year-old are not allowed to eat honey. If the queen is the only one laying eggs, all the bees in the hive are her children (except the drone she mated with, that is)! Bees lick and touch the queen to get the queens pheromones called the queen substance. Other workers can also get the queen substance by doing the same thing with the same worker. Worker bees make larvae food inside glands in their heads. It is called brood food. When the bees are done making the food, they squeeze the food into the larvae cells. But older larvae eat honey and bee bread, food made of honey and pollen. Sometimes larvae are swimming in their food! When a hive is getting crowded, bees make tilted cells for the queen larvae. Then the bees feed the queen larvae a mixture called royal jelly. Pupae don’t really eat but they stop eating. They use tissues and fats they stored when they were still larvae. When the queen bees are fully grown, they attack each other. If one queen survives, she will become the true queen bee of the hive.
When bees attack insects and animals that will take over or destroy the hive, it is easy for them to win but it is really, really hard to defeat bears.
