Honey Bees (Apiculture) Flashcards
History
- Used by cave dwellers
- Important to Greeks and Romans
- 1789 - invention of hives, frames, foundations
- Used as main source of sweetener before sugar was common
Importance to Humanity
- Direct: honey, bee pollen, royal jelly, bees wax
- Indirect: pollination - may be the most important thing we get from bees
- Livelihood for producers
Pollination
Tangerines, grapefruit, cherries, peaches, oranges, apples, almonds, cotton, etc
* These are things that are pollinated by honeybees
* If we didn’t have bees, we wouldn’t have these things
Queen
- Mother to all in the hive
- Generally only one per hive
- Fully functional female - productive tract works
- Larger than workers (longer and thinner than drones)
- Long life (several years possible)
- Produced by feeding royal jelly - the hive picks the queen by doing this
- Only bee to lay eggs
Drone
- Bigger and wider than workers
- Wider than queen
- No stinger, short tongue
- Very good antennae
- Best of times - worst of times (only have 1 job: fly around and look for a virign queen to mate with)
- Life of luxury, but life is short: Drones are killed in the fall by the workers
- Only real purpose is to store and pass on genetic material
- Develop by parthenogenesis
Parthenogenesis
- Development of an organism from an unfertilized egg
- Queen lays an infertile egg (haploid egg - one copy of DNA ) spontaneously develops
- Development continues like a normal embryo
- Result: males really just multiply and deliver queen’s genetic material
- Queen “determines” sex of offspring - sperm (produces female), withhold sperm (produces male)
Bee Reproduction
- Virgin queen makes mating flight
- Several drones mate with her in flight
- Queen goes back to hive (won’t leave hive for rest of life)
- Can be done artificially
- Queen lays an egg in each cell
- Egg hatches into larva
- Workers feed larvae (brood - baby bee)
- Works cap cell
- Emerges as adult worker bee
Workers
- Smallest bee
- Most abundant (3,000 to 60,000 in a hive)
- Female, but underdeveloped reproductive tract
Have:
* pollen baskets
* wax glands
* scent glands
* barbed stinger
* long tongue for collecting nectar
Worker Duties
- wax secretion
- brood rearing
- attending to queen
- guarding hive entrance
- nectar and pollen collection (provides all necessary nutrients for bees - other than water)
- bees work both day and night
Worker Lifespan
Depends on time of year
* during summer, may be one month
* wear out from flying, etc
* wings last approximately 500 miles
* late fall bees will live through winter
Pollen
- Pollen: Protein source. yellow thing on side of workers
- Nectar: carbohydrate
Bee stinger
- Stinger has barbs - when they sting you, it hooks and it can’t come back out, will crawl out and die because back part of them is being pulled off
- has venom
Equipment
Queen Excluder
* keeps larvae out of honey - keeps honey clean (esp. comb honey)
Wear a suit/veil to keep from getting stung
Need for Hive Tool
* Bees keep hive clean
* Patch holes, stick things together with propolis
* Hive tool used to pry bee hive apart
Brush
* to gently move bees
Smoker
* can puff smoke on the hive - calms bees and makes them less likely to sting
Swarming
- Important for proliferation of species
- Most common time for swarming
- Causes: overcrowded hive
- Will find a new hive
Swarm is made up of:
- queen, commonly a virgin
- workers, mostly young
- drones, mostly young
