Habitat

Honey bees live in large family groups called colonies. A full-sized colony at the height of the growing season contains an average of 60,000 individual bees. Honey bees tended by beekeepers live in wood boxes called hives. Some well-managed hives in bee yards contain up to 80,000 individual bees.

The central structure of the colony is the wax comb. It is made up of six-sided, white wax chambers or cells. The cells vary in size according to the purpose. Smaller chambers are for raising female worker bees, larger ones are for raising male drones. Queen chambers are the largest. The comb is made of beeswax, a substance secreted from worker bee abdominal glands. The wax is secreted as tiny flakes, which are then chewed and molded into cells. Other construction in and around the hive is done with propolis, a sticky substance bees manufacture from tree and plant resin. The comb contains the stored honey and is home for the immature bees.

Honey bees usually build their comb in a protected area or cavity with an access hole the size of a pencil eraser or larger. Wild (feral) honey bees nest in enclosed areas such as a hole in a tree if possible, but sometimes they will construct comb out in the open on a thick branch of a tree or under rock outcroppings. The elaborate exposed combs full of amber-colored honey they construct can be very beautiful.

Africanized honey bees are far less selective than European honey bees about where they will set up a colony. They will occupy a much smaller space than the European honey bee. They also seem to prefer to nest closer to the ground. Water meter boxes, mail boxes, animal burrows, trash, debris, even an empty soda pop can could be viewed as "home" to Africanized honey bees.

Honey bees move from site to site by swarming . A portion of the bees leave the colony with the old queen and take up residence in a new location. Africanized honey bees tend to swarm more often than European honey bees, and are also more likely to abscond. When bees " abscond" they all take off to find a new nest, rather than just a portion of the workers leaving. Bees typically abscond when they sense a threat to their colony or when foraging opportunities have almost been exhausted in the present location. Africanized honey bees have been selected over centuries to survive in areas where scarcity of resources is common and absconding is the only alternative if the colony is to survive.

Products

• Honey is composed mainly of a variety of sugars, traces of pollen and water. There are also emzymes present. The following from 490 samples of largely uncrystalized honeys...

  
  

  Moisture(%)	17.2
  Levulose(%)	38.19
  Dextrose(%)	31.28
  Sucrose(%)	1.31
  Maltose(%)	7.31
  Higher sugars(%)	1.50
  Undetermined(%)	3.1
  pH	3.91
  Free Acidity	22.03
  Lactone	7.11
  total Acidity	29.12
  Lactone/Free Acid	0.335
  Ash(%)	0.169
  Nitrogen(%)	0.041
  Diastase	20.8

  

  
  

• Flowers are beautiful to us, but for the plant they serve a critical function. Flowers are how plants produce seeds to reproduce. In many cases, the flower contains male and female parts, roughly equivalent to the male and female sexes of animals. The male parts of the flower are called the stamens and are made up of the anther at the top and the stalk or filament that supports the anther. The female elements are collectively called the pistil. The top of the pistil is called the stigma, which is a sticky surface receptive to pollen. The bottom of the pistil contains the ovary and the narrowed region in between is called the style. The male contribution or pollen is produced in the anther, and seeds develop in the ovary. Many of the fruits we eat are the thickened ovary walls surrounding the seeds.

  Not only does the flower contain the sexual parts necessary for reproduction, they are also like flashy roadside billboards advertising a rich supply of nectar and pollen ready and waiting for pollinating insects and other creatures.

  That is the bargain offered. Flowers trade rewards (in the form of sugary nectar and pollen) in return for the service that insects and other pollinators perform. Pollination is simply the transfer of pollen grains from an anther to a stigma. Fertilization occurs much later when the pollen grains germinate on the stigma and send down a pollen tube which releases the sex cells to fertilize the ovules. After fertilization, the ovules become the seeds, and the ovary wall becomes the fruit.

  

  Worker bees gather both pollen and nectar from flowers to feed to the larvae and other members of the colony. Nectar is the sweet fluid produced by flowers to attract bees and other insects, birds and mammals. Worker bees drink the nectar and store it in a pouch-like structure called the crop. They fly back to the hive and regurgitate the nectar to other "house bees." The house bees mix the nectar with enzymes and deposit it into a cell where it remains exposed to air for a time to allow some of the water to evaporate. The bees help the process along by fanning the open cells with their wings. The cell containing the resulting honey is later capped with beeswax and kept for future use.

  Honey bees have lots of little hairs on their body. Even their eyes have hairs. Pollen sticks to the hairs while the bees are visiting the flowers. A furry little bee wiggling around inside the flower picks up a lot of pollen. After getting pollen on their body hairs, the bees move it to a special area on their hind legs called pollen baskets . Foraging bees returning to the hive often have bright yellow or greenish balls of pollen hanging from these pollen baskets.

  Pollen is the yellowish or greenish powder-like substance that sometimes comes from flowers. It may be quite sticky. It contains the male contribution to the next generation of plants. Honey bees mix the pollen with some nectar to form a mixture called beebread that is a protein-rich food used to feed the larvae. As the worker bees move from flower to flower, they spread pollen to many different plants, including important foods such as vegetables (squash and cucum bers), fruits (apples, watermelon, plums, sweet cherries, citrus), nuts (almonds), plants grown for seed (sunflower), and animal feed crops such as clover.

  There is evidence that Africanized honey bees spend more time collecting pollen than do European honey bees, because they need extra protein to produce more brood. One possible reason for the success of Africanized honey bees in displacing milder-tempered bees is that in every respect, the Africanized honey bees appear to be more efficient and more diligent. They get up earlier, work later, and visit more flowers per foraging flight than do European bees. When the moon is bright, Africanized honey bees will often continue to forage late into the night. This is part of the Africanized honey bee's tendency to favor expansion and frequent division of the colony, as opposed to the European honey bee's tendency to build up large, stable colonies full of honey in order to survive the winter.

  Honey bees rely on their sense of vision to locate flowers. Bees see colors in the spectrum ranging from ultraviolet to orange, but do not see red, (Red flowers are visited by birds such as hummingbirds.) The flower advertises itself to the bees with colorful petals, many of which have shiny patches of ultraviolet that humans can't see except with special equipment. These ultraviolet patches are called bee guides or nectar guides. Like airport runway lights, these ultraviolet regions guide the bees to the nectar.

  Shape of the flower is also important. Some flowers have flat areas for ease of landing by bees and others have elaborate modifications to ensure pollen sticks to any bee that visits.

  During those hard times when there are few foraging opportunities, bees sometimes raid other, weaker colonies looking for honey to steal. The robber bees cannot enter a different hive unnoticed. Guard bees at the hive entrance usually try to fight off invaders in stinging duels. Africanized honey bees have a noticeable tendency to raid other colonies, especially during periods of drought or famine.

  Honey bees are attracted to sweets, especially liquid sweets in the form of open cans of soft drinks. This is why they sometimes gather around eating areas at open air events, like fairs and carnivals, and crawl around on straws and can or bottle tops. While bees are generally not very aggressive while foraging for food or water, they can sting when disturbed, which makes them quite unwelcome at such events.

  In addition to food, honey bees gather water for use in cooling the inside of the nest on hot days. They also use water to dilute the honey when they feed it to the larvae. Occasionally, honey bees collect the sticky resin and gum of trees and work into a substance called propolis. They used the propolis to plug unwanted openings in the hive so that mice and pests such as wax moths or ants can't get inside. The bees also spread a thin coating of propolis on the interior of the hive to protect against disease. When working a hive, the beekeeper uses a hive tool to pull apart the frames that may be stuck together with propolis.

  
  

• A society as efficiently organized as the honey-bee colony certainly would be expected to have a means of communication. The language of bees doesn't involve an alphabet or words and it was little understood until recent years. Professor Karl von Frisch, after some 40 years of observation and research, was able to interpret the language of bees. His experiments clearly showed that the bees have an accurate language based upon characteristic dances, odor, and taste perception. When a foraging bee locates a source of pollen or nectar, she can communicate this information to other bees in the colony accurately as to direction, distance from the hive, and the kind of plants supplying it.
  

  The language dance performed within a colony is oriented on the combs in relation to the sun. The angle between the sun, food source, and hive determines the direction of the dance orientation. A dance straight up on the combs vertical axis means towards the sun; to the right, so many degrees to the right of the sun; and to the left, so many degrees to the left of the sun. A rapid dance means a short distance; a slower dance means increased distance. The bees do not actually have to see the sun to be capable of transmitting or interpreting this food source information since they can perceive and interpret direction from the polarized light they receive from the sky. The plant producing the food is identified by the odor association of the food gathered by the dancing bee.

  Assume that a scout bee finds food in an apple orchard one mile to the east in the direction of the sun at 8:00 o'clock in the morning, the dancing forager will move over several cells straight up the vertical axis of the comb, vibrating its abdomen from left to right at a frequency appropriate to the distance. She then turns first right then left to reverse herself and repeats the straight-line run of the wagtail dance, pausing occasionally to give food to surrounding bees. She usually repeats the dance a number of times in one location and then moves on to another and performs the identical dance again. The bees of a certain age respond to food gathering leave the hive in search of food from the same source in the direction and distance indicated by a dancing bee. These bee recruits will not stop to visit plums, pears, dandelions, or some other kind of blossom after receiving the odor association of food from apple blossoms. If food is available from this same orchard at noontime, the dancing forgers will make the straight-line run of their wagtail dance 90° to the left of the vertical axis of the comb. If food is still available in the evening, the dance will orient along the vertical axis but in a downward direction.

  Scout bees forage for food sources before the main force of food-gathering bees venture forth to the harvest. The recruited bees also dance when they return to the colony as long as food is available. Thus, the number of foragers increases at a rapid rate, the increase being limited by the food available. When the supply from a given plant species is limited, other scouts from the same colony may find plants of a different species and location producing pollen or nectar. Thus, there may be more than one informative dance performed in the hive at one time. Honey bees once oriented to a plant species rarely visit others as long as the first source continues to supply food.

  Dances similar to those giving direction for food are performed by scout bees who locate a domicile to be occupied by a swarm that has issued from a colony. There are many other dances performed by bees that obviously extend the area of communication beyond food gathering and locating a domicile.