Bee

Bees are people’s hard-working helpers: They provide us with honey and ensure that we can harvest plenty of fruit because they pollinate the flowers of the plants.

Characteristics

What do bees look like?

Bees are insects and therefore arthropods. As with all insects, the body of the bee consists of three parts: the eyes are on the head, two antennae that serve as a nose, and the mouthparts, which consist of two strong jaws and a proboscis.

Two pairs of wafer-thin wings and six legs sit on the chest. The largest part of the body is the bee’s trademark: it is the yellow-black ringed abdomen with the poison sting. There are three different types of bees. The ones we usually see flying around are the workers: they are sterile females. That means they cannot reproduce – and measure twelve to 15 millimeters.

A queen bee is 16 to 20 millimeters long. Her abdomen is much larger than that of a worker bee because she is responsible for the offspring and lays more than 1500 eggs a day. The male bees are called drones. They are 14 to 18 millimeters in size. Drones don’t have a stinger, nor do they collect honey. Their main task is to mate with the queen.

Small yellow lumps can often be seen on the hind legs of the bees. On the outside of the hind legs are the so-called “basket” or “pants”: this is a spoon-shaped hollow surrounded by hair, in which the bee keeps pollen during its foraging flights. Pollen also gets stuck in the hairs on the body surface, the “fur”, and is thus carried from flower to flower. As a result, bees ensure that many plants are fertilized.

Where do bees live?

Honey bees originally come from Southeast Asia. Since they were kept as livestock by humans, they have spread all over the world. Today around three trillion bees live in around 52 million beehives worldwide! Bees are excellent master builders and make their own homes: they produce vertically hanging sheets of wax – the so-called honeycombs.

There they attach hexagonal cells where the larvae develop and store. The honeycombs of a beehive are a small miracle: the hexagonal shape of the cells fits together perfectly. So not a millimeter of space is lost.

What types of bees are there?

There are around 1300 different species of bees in Europe. However, unlike the honey bee, most of these wild bees live individually and not in colonies. Incidentally, bees are one of the oldest creatures of all: They have probably been living on earth for 100 million years!

How old do bees get?

The queen bee is three to five years old. A worker bee is only six weeks old in the summer; if it hatches in the fall and can hibernate, it lives up to nine months. Drones are only a few weeks old.

Behavior

How do honey bees live?

Honey bees are social animals that can only survive together in colonies. Such a bee colony is also called a colony and consists of 40,000 to 80,000 animals. Workers, queens, and drones have very specific tasks. Exactly what worker bees have to do depends on how old they are: from one to four days old, they are cleaner bees and are responsible for keeping the comb clean.

When workers are five to eleven days old, their forage glands are formed and they provide food for the offspring. By the age of 12 to 18 days, their wax glands have developed so that they can build honeycomb. When they are 19 to 21 days old, they guard the hive’s entrances against foreign intruders and enemies.

Finally, at 22 to 40 days, the workers fly to the bee pastures and collect pollen, nectar, and water. Bees can easily find their way back to their hive even from meadows far away. To do this, they have developed a sophisticated orientation system: they use the sun as a compass. When a bee leaves the hive, it remembers the position of the sun. Since she has a very precise sense of time, she knows where the sun must be at what time of day and can therefore find her way back to the beehive hours later.

But even when the sky is cloudy, bees can find their way around because they can perceive ultraviolet light and thus the direction of the light waves. When a bee returns from collecting the nectar stored in the honey stomach, it chokes the contents into the mouth of a so-called nurse bee.

She mixes the nectar with a substance she produces in a gland, fills it in a cell, and closes it with wax. This is how honey is produced, which the bees use as food in winter. A bee colony can produce up to a kilogram of honey per day.