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You don’t have to know a beekeeper to find honeybees. Almost any field of flowers in the early spring or summer months will have plenty of these busy little creatures buzzing around collecting nectar and pollen. The honeybee is usually no larger than three quarters of an inch long and have a reddish gold coloring with black bands in the abdomen area. The body of the honeybee is covered with a layer of fine hairs that are instrumental in the collecting and spreading of pollen. Honeybees are from the Apidae family and the Hymenoptera order of bees, wasp and ants. Even though there are many species in the Apidae family, the honeybee is the only family that produces the edible, thick, sweet, golden liquid known as honey. Honeybees were originally found only in areas of the Middle East and Asia. Recognizing the value of their honey producing ability and the ability to use their waxy comb for candle making, the honeybee was brought to North America by early British settlers. The newly introduced bees were kept in straw hives or hollow logs and while some escaped to establish new hives, others were taken west with the settlers.
The first thing to remember when you observe a honeybee is that all hives have three different types of bees. Queens are larger than the other bees in the hive and rarely leave this protected area except to mate. It is the queen honeybees’ job to lay eggs and produce a kind of chemical called a pheromone that causes the worker honeybees to lose interest in reproducing. The workers, in turn, collect nectar, build the comb, make honey, feed the queen and tend to the newly hatched larva. Drones are the noisiest of the honeybee clan, producing a loud buzz as they move around. The only function of the drone is to reproduce with the queen but since they lack stingers or food gathering body parts they remain near the hive to be fed and protected by the workers. Since the drones have little value to the hive activity except at certain times of the year they are only allowed around the hive when it is time to mate. Once the queen has mated most drones are driven from the nest to starve.
The life of most queen honeybees is a busy affair, rarely lasting longer than four years. Each day the queen produces close to 2,000 eggs stopping in short intervals to be fed by the worker honeybees. At any time during her life cycle if the queen finds she can no longer produce the chemical pheromone or lay eggs the workers begin preparing a new queen. The worker honeybee does this by taking one egg from a newly laid batch and placing it in a cell that has been prepared to produce a queen. When the larva has hatched it is fed only royal jelly which is produced by the workers. When the new queen emerges she will immediately set about destroying other queens that may have hatched and even any that have not hatched. The queen will then leave the hive and fly to an area where thousands of drone suitors are waiting to mate. Once she has mated with several of the drones she will return to the hive to begin laying eggs.
The hardest worker in a hive is the worker honeybee. These busy creatures secrete and form the wax that produces the honeycomb. Each pod of the comb is made large enough to hold honey, pollen or one of the developing larvae. The worker honeybee is also responsible for gathering pollen, making honey, capping off each pod when it is full, feeding the queen, chasing away drones, tending the larvae and protecting the nest. In most cases the honeybee you see zooming around fields of flowers is a worker honeybee. Even though the queen honeybee is equipped with a stinger that can be used repeatedly, the workers stinger can only be used once and results in death. The life span of the worker honeybee is approximately one month during honey production but during the colder months of the year they can live up to three months.
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