Honey Bees
Verminate pest control will continue to help educate the public as to the importance of this declining insect and if they have nested in a position which is to inconvenient we will remove the nest and relocate it for them. Pest control is also about conservation where possible.
Lifecycle
Foragers coming in loaded with pollen on the hive landing board.
Like other eusocial bees, a colony generally contains one breeding female, or "queen"; seasonally up to a few thousand males, or "drones"; and a large seasonally variable population of sterile female workers. Many minor details vary among the different species of honeybees, though there are some common features.
Eggs are laid singly in a cell in a wax honeycomb, produced and shaped by the workers. Larvae are initially fed with royal jelly produced by worker bees, later switching to honey and pollen. The exception is a larva fed solely on royal jelly, which will develop into a queen bee. The larva undergoes several moltings before spinning a cocoon within the cell, and pupating.
Young worker bees clean the hive and feed the larvae. After this, they begin building comb cells. They progress to other within-colony tasks as they become older, such as receiving nectar and pollen from foragers. Later still, a worker leaves the hive and typically spends the remainder of its life as a forager.
Workers cooperate to find food and use a pattern of "dancing" (known as the bee dance or waggle dance) to communicate with each other; this dance varies from species to species, but all living species of Apis exhibit some form of the behavior.
Honey bees also perform tremble dances which recruit receiver bees to collect nectar from returning foragers .
Virgin queens go on mating flights away from their home colony, and mate with multiple drones before returning. The drones die in the act of mating.
Colonies are established not by solitary queens, as in most bees, but by groups known as "swarms", which consist of a mated queen and a large contingent of workers. This group moves en masse to a nest site that has been scouted by workers beforehand. Once they arrive, they immediately construct a new wax comb and begin to raise new worker brood. This type of nest founding is not seen in any other living bee genus, though there are several groups of Vespid wasps which also found new nests via swarming (sometimes including multiple queens). Also, stingless bees will start new nests with large numbers of workers, but the nest is constructed before a queen is escorted to the site, which is not a true "swarm".
Pollination
Species of Apis are generalist floral visitors, and will pollinate a large variety of plants, but by no means all plants. Of all the honeybee species, only Apis mellifera has been used extensively for commercial pollination of crops and other plants. The value of these pollination services is commonly measured in the millions of pounds.
Honey
Honey is the complex substance made when the nectar and sweet deposits from plants and trees are gathered, modified and stored in the honeycomb by honey bees. All living species of Apis have had their honey gathered by indigenous peoples for consumption, though for commercial purposes only A. mellifera and A. cerana have been exploited to any degree. Honey is sometimes also gathered by humans from the nests of various stingless bees.
Beeswax
Worker bees of a certain age will secrete beeswax from a series of glands on their abdomens. They use the wax to form the walls and caps of the comb. As with honey, most indigenous peoples will gather beeswax for various purposes.
Pollen
Bees collect pollen in the pollen basket and carry it back to the hive. In the hive, pollen is used as a protein source necessary during brood-rearing. In certain environments, excess pollen can be collected from the hives of A. mellifera and A. cerana. It is often eaten as a health supplement.
Propolis
Propolis (or bee glue) is created from resins, balsams and tree saps. Those species of honey bees which nest in tree cavities use propolis to seal cracks in the hive. Dwarf honey bees use propolis to defend against ants by coating the branch from which their nest is suspended to create a sticky moat. Propolis is also used in some cosmetics.
Defence
All honey bees live in colonies where the workers will sting intruders as a form of defense, and alarmed bees will release a pheromone that stimulates the attack response in other bees. The different species of honey bees are distinguished from all other bee species by the possession of small barbs on the sting, but these barbs are found only in the workers. The sting and associated venom sac are also modified so as to pull free of the body once lodged (autotomy), and the sting apparatus has its own musculature and ganglion which allow it to keep delivering venom once detached.
It is presumed that this complex apparatus, including the barbs on the sting, evolved specifically in response to predation by vertebrates, as the barbs do not usually function (and the sting apparatus does not detach) unless the sting is embedded in fleshy tissue. While the sting can also penetrate the flexible exoskeletal joints in appendages of other insects (and is used in fights between queens), in the case of Apis cerana defense against other insects such as predatory wasps is usually performed by surrounding the intruder with a mass of defending workers, who vibrate their muscles so vigorously that it raises the temperature of the intruder to a lethal level. This is also used to kill a queen perceived as intruding or defective, an action known to beekeepers as balling the queen, named for the ball of bees formed.
Communication
Honey bees are known to communicate through many different chemicals and odors, as is common in insects, but also using specific behaviors that convey information about the quality and type of resources in the environment, and where these resources are located. The details of the signaling being used vary from species to species; for example, the two smallest species, Apis andreniformis and Apis florea, dance on the upper surface of the comb, which is horizontal (not vertical, as in other species), and workers orient the dance in the actual compass direction of the resource to which they are recruiting.
If you have a problem with honey bees, Verminate can help you! Contact us today for more information.
