Bee
| Bees | ||||||||||
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Andrenidae Anthophoridae Apidae Colletidae Ctenoplectridae Halictidae Megachilidae Melittidae Stenotritidae |
Bees are flying insects, closely related to wasps and ants. They are adapted for feeding on nectar, and play an important role in pollinating flowering plants. There are over 16,000 described species, and possibly around 30,000 species in total.
Bees may be solitary, or may live in various sorts of communities. The most advanced of these are eusocial colonies, found among the honeybees and stingless bees. Sociality is believed to have evolved separately in different groups of bees.
| Table of contents |
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2 Solitary, Communal, and Quasisocial Bees 3 Kleptoparasitic Bees 4 Miscellaneous |
Eusocial bees live in large hives, each of which has a single queen together with workerss and drones.
The queen, the only fertile female, deposits all the eggs from which the other bees are produced.
Except for her one mating flight or to establish a new colony, the queen rarely leaves the hive.
The queen deposits each egg in a cell prepared by the worker bees.
The egg hatches into a small larva which is fed by nurse bees (worker bees who maintain the interior of the colony).
After about a week (depending on species), the larva is sealed up in its cell by the nurse bees.
After another week (again, depending on species), it will emerge an adult bee.
Both workers and queens are fed royal jelly during the the first three days of the larval stage. Then workers are switched to a diet of pollen and nectar or diluted honey, while those indended for queens will continue to receive royal jelly. This causes the larva to develop to the pupa stage more quickly, while being also larger and fully developed sexually. Queen breeders consider good nutrition during the larval stage to be of critical importance to the quality of the queens raised, good genetics and sufficient number of matings also being factors.
Queens are not raised in typical horizontal brood cells of the honeycomb. They are specially constructed to be much larger, and have a vertical orientation. As the queen finishes her larval feeding, and pupates, she moves into a head downward position, from which she will later chew her way out of the cell. At pupation the workers cap or seal the cell. Just prior to emerging from their cells, young queens can often be heard "piping." This is considered likely to be a challenge to other queens for battle.
Eusocial Bees
Worker bees are infertile females. Worker bees secrete the wax used to build the hive, clean and maintain the hive, raise the young, guard the hive and forage for nectar and pollen.
In honeybees, the worker bees have a modified ovipositor called a stinger with which they can sting to defend the hive, but the bee will die soon after.
Drone bees are the male bees of the colony. Drone honeybees do not forage for nectar or pollen. The primary purpose of a drone bee is to fertilize a new queen. Drones mate with the queen in flight. They die immediately after mating.
In some species, drones are suspected of playing a contributing role in the temperature regulation of the hive. Drone bees have no stinger, since a stinger is actually a modified ovipositor.
Queens live on an average about three years. The workers have but a brief existence, not three months long on an average.
Some other bees form small colonies. For example, most species of bumblebee (Bombus terrestris, B. pratorum, et al.) live in colonies of 30-400 bees.
(By contrast, an average honeybee hive at the height of summer will have 40,000 - 80,000 bees.)
The queen bee is typically able to survive on her own for at least a short time (unlike queens in eusocial species who must be cared for at all times).
Other species of bee such as the Orchard Mason bee (Osmia lignaria) and the hornfaced bee (Osmia cornifrons) are solitary in that every female is fertile.
There are no worker bees for these species.
Solitary bees typically produce neither honey nor beeswax.
They are immune from tracheal and varroa mites. (see diseases of the honeybee)
Cuckoo bees are bumblebee look-alikes that invade bumblebee nests and lay their eggs. The bumblebees raise the young as their own. Megachilid bees also have other megachilid Coelioxys bees whose young are placed into the already provisioned nests of these solitary bees. They destroy the host larvae and eat the food.
Bees are the favorite meal of Merops apiaster, a bird.
See Also
honeybee, africanized bee, how to tell bees from wasps
External links:
Solitary, Communal, and Quasisocial Bees
Kleptoparasitic Bees
Miscellaneous
All bees eat nectar and pollen.
Bees are excellent pollinators and play an important role in agriculture.
Taxonomy
