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Honey bees are social insects
with a marked division of labour amongst the various bees in the hive. A
colony contains one queen; between 500 to 1,000 drones and about 30,000 to 60,000
workers.
The matriarch of the colony is the queen. Nurtured on a special diet of
royal jelly, the queen is the only sexually-developed female in the hive. A
few days after hatching, the queen mates with drones in flight. The drones,
which are stout male bees that lack stingers, fulfil their single purpose in
the colony by mating with the queen.
A productive queen will lay up to 3,000 eggs in a single day. Once hatched,
these worker bees perform a sequence of jobs – cleaning the nursery, caring for
and feeding the larvae, collecting nectar, making wax comb, guarding the
hive and fanning their wings to keep the hive cool.
Can you find
the Queen?
Click on the bees and get searching
You may also see
larvae, pollen and honey!
At 1am in
the morning, the bees are still busy during the summer night. You can see
them trying to keep cool during one of the hottest nights in July 2006.
The bees regulate the
temperature in the hive by fanning at the entrance. If they did not do this,
the hive could become too warm and at around 95°F, the wax comb would collapse and there would
be honey everywhere!
Here will be about
70,000 bees
each hive
Click on the
hive and take a good look!
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