Life Cycle
Abridged version
Abridged version
Bees, castes and the colony
The Colony Queen Workers Communication Drones Swarming Seasons
Basic Assessment topics
2.1 able to give an elementary account of the development of queens. workers and drones in the honey bee colony;
2.2 able to state the periods spent by the female castes and the drone in the four stages of their life (egg, larva, pupa and adult);
2.3 able to name the main local flora from which honey bees gather pollen and nectar;
2.4 able to give a simple definition of nectar and a simple description of how it is collected, brought back to the hive and is converted into honey;
2.5 able to give a simple description of the collection and use of pollen, water and propolis in the honey bee colony;
2.6 able to give an elementary description of the way in which the honey bee colony passes the winter.
Introduction
Unless I indicate otherwise, “bees” refers to honey bees. Bees live in family groups (colonies) of 10-60 thousand, depending on the time of year. They have one queen (Q) whose sole job is to lay eggs. Drones are male bees, and the workers, true to their name, do all the work. Foragers do about 10 nectar collecting mission daily. They collect nectar in their honey crop and pollen in the pollen baskets on their legs. When they arrive back at the hive, the nectar is passed on to other bees who cure (concentrate) it, initially by holding a drop in their jaws and then by dropping it to the comb. It takes a further 1 -5 days to reduce the water content to 20%. Foragers rest at night; in other respects, the colony is active 24/7. The wax hexagonal tubes collectively called honeycomb underpins their success. They use comb to store honey (stores) and pollen and to raise their young (brood).
A large swarm hanging in a tree. The bees bivouac until scout bees find them a new nest site. © Crown copyright
Because of team work, the sum of their activity is greater than their individual contributions. Because of this, they have been dubbed a super-organism. Much like humans.
Home: As long as a cavity is large enough with a small entrance, they aren’t fussy. In nature, they live in cavities in trees, rocks (and holes in houses), but we trap them in hives. Bees often abscond from an empty hive unless they have chosen it. But if we stop them from leaving for a few days, the Q lays some eggs, and the workers will not abandon them, so they call their hive home.
Communication: Bees communicate through dances, food, scents, and vibrations. This enables a colony to effectively respond to threats and co-ordinate their activities. Resilience: In 1992 the varroa mite arrived in the UK and devastated honeybees. However, beekeepers soon learnt to control it. Now varroa resistant bees are becoming common. Like all creatures, reproduction dictates their pattern of life. Bees do this by swarming; 50-75% of the bees leave their home with the Q and form a new colony.
A bee drinking. Note her antennae are placed down in the water as she drinks.
Basic Assessment: identify the female castes and drones & the difference between drone, worker, and honey cappings
1a. Communication
Bees communicate through dances, food, scents, and vibrations. They can not perceive sound.
Pheromones are scents that bees use to communicate widely. They are often transmitted by sharing food. For example, the Queen Mandibular pheromone (QMP) is a mixture of 5 chemicals; The mix of the substances mediates the message. Whereas, the only pheromones that dogs understand are “I want to hump” and “Your butt smells nice” (I jest).
QMP has many effects, The most important one, as far as beekeepers are concerned, is its role in swarming.
When the Q is removed from a colony, the QMP suddenly drops. The whole colony appreciates this within 15 minutes, They scurry around, searching for her.
Vibrations can transmit information an intermediate distance. When a new queen emerges from her cocoon (cell) she makes vibrations that we hear as “piping”; They are signals to workers to instruct them when to stop releasing queens to head swarms.
Bees’ antennae are bristling with sensors: chemical, magnetic, movement, and carbon dioxide.
1b. The Queen
A Queen’s lifecycle = three days as an egg + 5 days as a larva + 8 days as a pupa + 9 days mating and preparing to lay, and 1 - 4 years laying eggs.
Queen laying an egg whilst workers caress her.
The queen’s distinctive features are that her body is larger than other bees (19 mm long), her dorsal thorax is large, domed, dark, and her abdomen protrudes beyond her wings.
Queen Development
Formation of Queen cells (QC).
When an egg destined to become a Q hatches, the workers extend the walls around the cell to form a QC. Inside this, the larva floats on a pool of nutritious, white, royal jelly.
After five days, the cell is full and sealed, and she pupates. A mature QC looks like an unshelled peanut.
Photo: Queen cells - about two days old.
To one side of them is an area of sealed worker brood (pupating workers).
After pupating for eight days, the Q emerges and spends a few days maturing before going out to mate.
A few days after mating, she starts laying.
Laying eggs
The queen measures the size of each cell with her rear legs before laying. She does not fertilise the egg if it is a (large) drone-sized cell. Fertilised eggs become workers.
Queens can live for four years, but most beekeepers cull them after 1-2 years. This is because something toxic in our environment makes them more likely to swarm, disappear, or fail. The risk is lower with vigorous young queens.
1c. Workers
The worker lifecycle: 3 days as an egg + 6 days as larva + 12 days pupating + days as house bee, + an average of 21 days foraging
Workers are female like the Q, but they are only fed rich food for three days, and their subsequent diet (and exposure to pheromones) suppress their femininity. They are 12mm long.
A sad bee - she has lost an antenna? No! It is poking in the direction of the camera.
Video - bee development - from National Geographic
1d.House bees
Bees are house bees for 21 days. Newly emerged bees look small and grey and cannot fly or sting; they help keep the brood warm and do menial tasks for several days. After this, they graduate to prepare cells for the Q and then to look after the brood (eggs, larvae and pupae).
Middle-aged house bees can multitask and perform several jobs at the same age, such as feeding brood, receiving nectar, packing pollen, and ventilating. However, they are more adept at doing one particular job at a specific age. Crucially, bees aged between 1 and 11 days old feed the Q, and ones between 4 and 17 days old look after larvae and can produce wax.
Whilst still house bees, they make tentative forays outside and do short orientation flights, learning the position of the hive. Orientating bees fly in small groups, facing the hive, and form a noisy little cloud. High above their hive, bees orientate by flying in wide circles. “Pre-foraging” bees fly around the area surrounding the hive, learning the topography. Not infrequently they get lost.
Unsealed worker brood
Assessment: Identify brood at all stages
The Q lays eggs in a circumscribed area called the brood nest. It is usually sited in the centre of the hive. The maturity of the brood has a pattern. The Q first lays eggs in the middle of the comb and then successively lays eggs in bands around it, like the rings of an onion.
A comb containing eggs is also called brood and is referred to as a brood frame or a frame of eggs.
The areas of pallor (first photo) are due to open brood. If there is a surplus of stores, they are placed on the edge of the brood. In this way, it is near the open brood that needs feeding. The lower picture has a band of orange pollen around the brood. There are honeycombs in the upper corners.
In a hive where they live in two hive boxes (also known as hive chambers), the nest occasionally spans the gap with an oval brood pattern as in the first photo.
1e. Guards
On the cusp of being a forager, a few bees become guards, although which bees are doing this at any time is quite fluid.
A bee is a guard for one day, more or less. When I say guard, there is a massive variation in how they behave. One colony is chilled, while guards from another hurl themselves at you when you are 10 meters away.
Attacking an imposter
Guard bees stay close to the entrance and communicate threats to the rest of the colony.
Smoke repels bees, knocks out their ability to sense alarm pheromones and stimulates them to gorge themselves.
If a colony is repeatedly mistreated its character will become unpleasant. Treat your bees carefully!
1f. Foragers
During the active season, foragers live, an average of 21 days, but their longevity varies greatly. Some survive over 36 days, but many live less than 8.
Foraging and the super-organism
Full polllen sack
Able to give a simple description of the collection and use of pollen, water, and propolis in the honey bee colony; Foragers collect four things: pollen, nectar, water, and resin. Pollen is for protein and fat, nectar is for carbohydrates, and water is for diluting honey or cooling the hive. Resin is turned in to propolis. It is a tacky brown substance. Foragers do about 10 nectar collecting missions daily. They collect nectar in their honey crop and pollen in the pollen baskets on their legs.
Resin is usually collected from Poplars, Ash, Chestnut or coniferous trees. In this case resin has oozed from a Beech tree. Bees carry it home in their pollen sacs.
An experienced forager with tattered wings
Navigation and drifting
They navigate by the sun, magnetoreception and by internalising a monochrome memory of the features in the landscape. Distance is estimated by “optic flow,” i.e. the faster features go past, the further I’m going." Once foragers get close to their target, they activate their colour vision. Initially attracted to flowers by scent, it is only when they are close, at around one metre, that they see blobs of colour and at less than 30cm, the flowers become visible.
Predation
A Crab spider
A few days later the spider had colour shifted.
If a forager finds danger at the nectar source, like a dead bee, when she returns home, she gives a vibrational signal and head-butts a dancing bee, asking her to stop.
Nectar
The photo shows the rear side of the Beekeeper’s Rule - sold by Thorne. The other side is a brood calendar.
Bees naturally go for the most concentrated nectar sources.
Flowers produce little nectar in prolonged dry weather; a lack of nectar is called a dearth. A good source of nectar is called a honey/nectar flow. .
Honeydew is “nectar” obtained from aphids and results in dark honey.
A field of mustard - a good source of nectar
Communication - the Waggle Dance
Foragers generally don’t just fly willy-nilly to find some flowers; scouts ordain 40 - 90 % of flights. These scout bees fly out early in the morning. If they find a good source of nectar, they tell the bees back in the hive, who are awaiting their work schedule.
It works like this: the scout flies back and forth between the hive and the flowers up to 10 times before starting her dance. During this process, she learns the direction and flight distance (not the direct distance) to the nectar source. Once confident, she lets other bees know by dancing on the frames.
She communicates using a waggle dance. Please refer to Figure 1. The flight distance is indicated by the length of A (including detours) and the quality of the source by the vigorousness of her waggling abdomen (W). Also, it indicates the correct angle from where the sunbeams transect the horizon to the nectar source A (i.e. the azimuth). She alternates her return journeys between R2 and R1. So she runs up A, turns left to R2, and up A again, only to take the right-hand fork R1 for her return journey. She dances upwards if the source of nectar is in front of the hive entrance and downwards if it is behind.
Figure 1. The pattern of the waggle dance
Watch a Video of a dancing bee
1h. Drones
Three days as an egg + 7 as larva, + 14 days pupating, + 15 days preparing to fly + 34 - 55 days flying = 94 days
From a genetic point of view, males have only one of each set of chromosomes; This is what makes them male. They are layabout sex machines who are slow to grow up. Drones are fed by workers for the first ten days of their adult lives.
Sealed drone brood. The cells are larger than worker brood and more domed.
Whatever the race of the bee, drones have broad abdomens, furry brown/grey thorax, huge inky black eyes and are 15mm long. Their abdomens vary from gunmetal grey to yellow/brown stripes like their sisters.
Their huge eyes are to seek out queens, and their broad thorax houses powerful flight muscles. They have no stinger.
Drone Congregation Areas (DCA) - mating lek
On a summer afternoon, in fine weather, an amazing 8 - 15,000 drones, sometimes many more, fly to a mating lek hoping to find a queen and mate.
DCA are invariably sized 100m2 and open to the wind with a view of the horizon. They arise at the same place every year, and everyone is mystified how this happens.
1i. Swarming
Basic Assessment: Give an elementary description of swarming
Two factors that influence when swarming occurs are
Queen mandibular hormone (QMP) is important.
Congestion
With experience and an inspection at just the right time it is possible to predict their intention.
The swarming process is like this: Eight days after starting as an egg, the queen cells (QC) are capped so that the queens can pupate. Soon after the first cell is capped, the old queen leaves (swarms) with an entourage of bees.. A swarm consists of 50-75% of the colony.
Before flying to their new home they have to find it! The queen and cloud of bees (the swarm) fly out and cluster (the cluster is also called a swarm) in a tree, on a post, in a hedge, or something similar nearby. They bivouac until scout bees, about 100-200 of them, find a suitable nest site. Small swarms called casts are headed by virgin queens and fly straight to their new homes, which are often close to their mother hive.
When the tops of the frames are well covered, the colony may be ready to swarm.
This swarm is easy to collect. Cut the branch and shake the bees into a nuc hive. © Crown copyright
Scouts dance on the surface of the swarm to let other scouts know about a site they have discovered; in this way, others check it out. Scouts advertising less favourable sites gradually stop dancing. Finally, they all dance the same dance. They’ve come to a decision.
As soon as they enter the new nest cavity, they create a milieu suitable for drawing wax and caring for their brood.
The home colony after the swarm
This is a nice swarm cell with large sealed drone brood cells nearby and a small area of sealed worker brood in the distance. Some drone cells are protruding more than usual because they derive from unfertilised eggs that have been laid in worker cells. This may be a sign of a failing queen.
Seven days after the swarm, the new queen emerges from her QC and mates at a DCA with a success rate usually greater than 95% where I live (less well in some areas).
The following spring, the cycle is repeated. Colonies build up to swarm and be ready for the honey flow in June/July.
Wax production
Wax plates are produced from Structures on their ventral abdomen. First, bees gorge themselves on honey and then hang in position for 24 hours. If a frame on which they are drawing comb is lifted, bees hang onto each other, forming “daisy chains.”
Building comb takes a lot of energy—7 lb of sugar per 1 lb of wax; about 4 Kg per box of frames.
For more information: swarming
1j. What bees do in each season
Spring = swarming and expanding
Summer =collecting stores
Autumn = preparing for winter
Winter =overwintering
Expansion and reproduction
Colony growth begins in February, when the Q starts laying a significant number of eggs, preparing the colony for swarming or the spring nectar flow. March is critical, as they have more brood than bees and may run out of stores.
Swarm preparations. When the colony grows so that stores and brood fills up to 80% of the brood box the colony swarms.
Summer
Gathering stores
They race to collect enough honey and pollen to get them through the winter.
Basic Assessment: describe how honey bees pass the winter.
Autumn - Preparing for winter
Drones become superfluous and are dragged out of the hive and left to die.
The workforce shrinks, and winter bees that live for five months are born. If the queen is weak, they replace her without swarming, an event known as supersedure.
When the exterior temperature drops, the bees start to cluster together for warmth - below 14 deg.C in poorly insulated hives, less if well protected.
A Drone in the winter
An occasional drone survives the autumn exodus.
Insect decline and threats to pollinators
Fungicides may adversely affect bees.
Populations of wild pollinators like solitary bees and hoverflies are in steep decline. Research in Germany observed a 76-82% decline in flying insects in protected areas over the past 27 years.
Growing bee-friendly flowers in your garden is a good idea - every little bit helps. Insects need a rich floral landscape.
3. Human attitudes towards wasps and bees
Many people probably regard insects as unpleasant things that sting. But we can use our bees to help people reconnect with nature. Members of my association go into schools to talk about bees, which seems an excellent place to start. The children and teachers have a good time.
Next up - queen cells;
Supermarket billboard
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