Honey Bee

In late winter the mustard fields of the Terai turn bright yellow, and the whole field hums. Look closely and the humming turns out to be honey bees. A bee lands on a flower, pushes its head inside, drinks the sweet juice called nectar and flies on to the next flower. After a while the bees start flying off in the same direction. Follow them and you may find their home: a hive hanging from the branch of a tree or tucked under a rock, crowded with thousands of bees. Watch that hive carefully and you will see that the bees are not all alike. A few are large, some are dark and hairy, and most are small and very busy.

This small scene raises good questions. What do bees eat? Are all the bees in one hive the same kind? Why do people build boxes for bees? Do bees help us only by making honey? Each of these has a clear answer once we see how a bee lives and how its body is built.

A honey bee is an insect. It lives freely in a special home that it builds for itself, called a hive. Like crabs, spiders and butterflies, it has jointed legs and a hard outer covering, so it belongs to the phylum Arthropoda.

One hive may hold tens of thousands of bees, yet they do not live as strangers. There is a high level of understanding and discipline among the members of the colony. Every bee has its own job and keeps busy with it all the time, and every member is disciplined and hardworking. This sharing out of jobs is called division of labour, and bees show it to a very high degree.

A hive holds three kinds of honey bee: the queen, the drone and the worker. Together they collect pollen and nectar from flowers and make honey from the nectar. Nectar and pollen are the bees' food, and honey is the food they store for later.

Wild bees build their own hive. They make the comb from wax that comes out of their own bodies and hang it from a tree branch, a cliff or the roof of an old building. Such a hive is a natural hive. When people farm honey bees, they build an artificial hive for them instead: usually a wooden box fitted with frames that can be lifted out. The bees build their comb on these frames, and the farmer can take out one frame to check the bees or collect honey without breaking the whole hive.

Should people make hives for bees? There are good reasons to. A box hive shelters the colony from rain, wind and enemies. The farmer can take honey without destroying the colony, and the bees can be kept close to the crops that need them. A colony that is well looked after grows stronger year by year.

People have kept bees in traditional ways since ancient times, for example in hollow logs or in holes left in the walls of houses. Since the 20th century, beekeeping has been done not only for honey but also for pollination and for producing wax. As a bee moves from flower to flower for food, it carries pollen with it, and this helps crops such as mustard, apple and pumpkin to set seeds and fruits. Today modern hives are used and beekeeping is run as an agricultural business, because modern hives give more honey. Bees are also studied separately so that they can be farmed well as a business.

So bees help people in more ways than one. They give honey and wax, and by pollinating crops they help farmers get a better harvest.

A honey bee is generally 9 mm to 20 mm long. That is from a little under one centimetre up to two centimetres. Like every other insect, its body is divided into three parts: the head, the thorax and the abdomen.

The head carries a pair of compound eyes, a pair of antennae and the mouth parts. The antennae pick up stimuli from the surroundings, such as smell and touch. Each compound eye is built from many tiny units, and each unit looks in a slightly different direction, so the bee can see around itself without turning its head.

The thorax is made of three segments. A pair of legs grows from each segment, so a bee has three pairs of legs, six in all. The legs are jointed, and jointed legs are the reason the bee is placed in the phylum Arthropoda. Two segments of the thorax also carry a pair of wings each, and these wings let the bee fly long distances in search of flowers.

The abdomen has 9 segments, but not all of them can be seen clearly. In adult females 6 segments are prominent, and in adult males 7 segments are prominent. In the bees that have a sting, it lies at the tip of the abdomen, and the bee uses it to defend its colony.

Every hive holds three kinds of bee: the queen bee, the drone bee and the worker bee. They differ in size, shape and body parts, and each kind has its own work. The queen and the workers are females; the drones are males.

The queen bee is the largest bee in the hive, and her body is long and elongated. Her head is smaller and more rounded than the heads of the other bees. Her proboscis is short and covered with hairs. A sting is present at the end of her abdomen.

Generally there is only one queen in a hive. Her main function is to lay eggs, and all the eggs of the colony come from her. She also controls the activities of all the bees in the hive according to the situation.

The queen's body produces a special scented substance called pheromone. With its help she attracts the males for mating. Pheromones are also used for communication among the bees and for finding the location of the hive.

The queen lives the longest of all the bees in the hive, about 2 to 5 years. When the colony needs a new queen, the worker bees feed royal jelly to a larva, and that larva grows into a queen.

The drone bee is smaller than the queen but larger, more blackish and hairier than the worker. It has no sting, no pollen basket and no wax-producing glands, so it cannot defend the hive, gather pollen or build comb. It is the laziest bee in the hive and is even fed by the worker bees. Its function is to fertilise the queen bee.

Drones are different even in their cells. They are haploid, with only 16 chromosomes, while the queen and the workers are diploid, with 32 chromosomes. This is because drones develop from unfertilised eggs. That process is called parthenogenesis. A drone survives for only about two months.

Worker bees are the smallest bees in the hive, yet they are by far the most numerous: about 20,000 to 80,000 of them can be found in one hive. Their bodies have a special structure suited to work. Their mouth parts are of the chewing and lapping type, so they can chew and shape wax and lap up nectar.

Worker bees are extremely hardworking. Their legs are densely covered with hair, and the legs also carry pollen baskets. As a worker moves over flowers, pollen sticks to the hairs. The bee packs it into the pollen baskets and carries it back to the hive.

Nearly every job in the hive is done by the workers:

• collecting nectar and pollen from flowers
• constructing the hive from wax
• nursing the young bees
• protecting the hive, using the sting when needed
• feeding the drones, and raising a new queen with royal jelly

A worker lives for about 6 weeks to 6 months, far shorter than the queen.