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Index of Bugs
Honeybees live in colonies or bee hives. The honeycombs inside the hive are made up of small boxes called cells. The cells are six-sided or hexagons. All the cells together make up the comb. The comb is made from wax that bees make with their wax glands. Bees are called social insects because they live and work together as a community. Thousands of female bees, called worker bees, live together in a hive with a queen bee. The worker bees are all females, but they almost never lay eggs.
Worker bees do almost all the chores in the hive. They gather pollen or nectar, guard the entrance, clean the hive, build the comb, make honey, tend the queen, and feed the larvae. They even fan the hive with their wings to keep it cool on a hot summer day.
The queen bee is larger than the worker bees. She lays about a thousand eggs each day! The queen bee walks from cell to cell to lay a small white egg in each one. Inside the cells, the eggs hatch into larvae or grubs. The workers take care of all the larvae, which include several queen bee larvae. The worker bees take pollen mixed with honey to feed them. The larvae eat a lot, but the pupae do not eat at all. When the larvae are ready to turn into pupae, the worker bees close off the cell with wax. Inside, the grubs pupate and metamorphose into bees in about 12 days.
Bees forage thousands of flowers a day to gather nectar and pollen. Nectar and pollen are food for bees. Pollen is sometimes called bee bread. Nectar is a sweet liquid found inside flowers. The bee laps and sucks up nectar with her tube-like tongue and stores it in her honey stomach. The female worker bees make honey from nectar in the bee hive. It takes more than 5,000 flower visits to make one teaspoon of honey. Bees eat this honey in the winter when there is no food available from flowers.
If a female larva is fed special food called royal jelly, she becomes a queen bee. If not, she becomes a worker bee. A new queen goes on her nuptial, or wedding flight, a flight to mate with drones. Only a few drones, or male bees, live in each hive. Thousands of drones from many bee colonies gather in one place. Queens fly there, too. The drones mate with a queen bee. After the young queen has mated, she heads to the colony where she was raised and becomes the new queen. The old queen and approximately half of the workers leave the hive as a swarm, to find a new nest site.
To learn more about honey bees and to see them in action, order the Backyard Bugs DVD.
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