Apis Mellifera

Now that the hive is installed, the bees are busilly flying back and forth, building up the comb on the frames inside the hive, we can talk about Apis Mellifera or as most know her, the honey bee. If you are like me, Mellifera probably makes it sound like bees are mean or evil, but it simply means "that bears honey", a much sweeter interpretation!

The different castes of bees

A honey bee colony is composed of three types of bees, the worker bee, the drone and the queen. As with just about everything in nature, each creature plays an important role to keep the colony in perfect balance.

The queen is the most important bee in the hive, she is the mother of the bees and represents the unity of the hive. Her role however is limited to producing eggs, she does not "rule" over the other bees as romantic notions would have us believe. In a colony, it is the worker bees who "decide" how the hive is run; this is done through an intricate balance of pheromones in the hive and the bees' natural instinct.

Stages of the develoment of a bee

In the summer, a productive queen will lay about 2,000 eggs each day. Worker bees will then feed the eggs and take care of them through their various stages as shown in the image to the right. The queen inspects each cell with her antennae to determine what type of egg she should lay. Cells destined for drones are much larger than those for regular worker bees, and a cell for a future queen is also bigger, sticks out of the frame and looks like a peanut.

So a queen is born in this "queen cup", but what is it that makes her a queen? Her diet! All bee larvae are given royal jelly for the first three days, after that only a queen will continue to feed on royal jelly, allowing her to develop more quickly and fully, as the only bee capable of laying eggs. On very rare occasions do worker bees develop the ability to lay eggs. This magic happens only because of an inbalance in the hive (accidental loss of the queen for example) which triggers physical changes in certain bees.

Millions of years have perfected the marvellous development of honey bees. Each colony is in fact a living organism, with each bee contributing to its incredible existence. I will never cease to be awed by their magical bodies, mysterious communication and innate solidarity.

Male bees, or drones, also have only one role: to mate with a queen.The drones fly for miles each day to "drone congregation areas" where they wait for a new queen on her "virgin flight". Drones do not collect their own food, they are fed by the workers from their own hive or other hives they may visit. In order to ensure genetic diversity, during the first few days of her life, a queen will mate with over a dozen drones. The sperm will be stored in her spermateca, which will allow her to lay fertile eggs until the end of her life. A drone's reproductive organ is left inside the queen, tearing part of his abdomen and causing him to die shortly after mating. Those drones that do survive the summer are forced out of the hive and no longer allowed back in, for the bees will need to conserve their stores of food to ensure the survival of the working population through the winter.

A drone visiting our hive, just coming for his lunch and heading back out.
These drones seem to have a pretty sweet life, doing nothing all day until
the day they mate and die, but they too play a vital role within the hive!

Drones have big eyes on
the top of their heads to
 better see the queen

Here is a great video of the life cycle of the bees. It is 10 minutes long, but it is quite amazing!




In a future post, I will talk more about the worker bees and the many incredible roles they play within the colony.