What are bees?
Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their role in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey and beeswax. There are nearly 20,000 known species of bees in seven recognized biological families.They are found on every continent except Antarctica, in every habitat on the planet that contains insect-pollinated flowering plants.
Bees range in size from tiny stingless bee species whose workers are less than 2 millimetres long, to Megachile pluto, the largest species of leafcutter bee, whose females can attain a length of 39 millimetres.
Halictidae are the most common bees in the Northen Hemisphere. They are also called sweat bees, because they are often attracted to perspiration.
The origin of bees
The origin of bees
Bees have been on this Earth for over 80 million years. They have evolved from wasp-like insects, and have been in their present form for over 30 million years. Today, there are more than 20,000 species of bees and 700 races in the entire world!
The incredible bee society
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| Queen bee |
Drones - male individuals of the apiary that don't have sting or organs for collecting food. Their pure purpose is to fertilize the queen bee. They can live for up to 2 months.
Queen bee: the largest individual, her main mission is to lay eggs and manage the apiary. Her life span is 3-5 years. She leaves the beehive only twice in her life, first to reproduce and then to swarm.
Bees spend most of their lives performing activities inside their nests and only a small portion of their activities take place outside in the environment, where we take notice of them.
How do bees make honey?
Making honey is a complex process that requires a teamwork of worker bees. Some of them fly outside of the beehive in search of pollen and nectar. One worker collects either nectar or pollen. Those who collect nectar, store them in special honey stomach that can carry load up to bees own weight.
When their nectar sacs are full, workers fly to the hive where they pass it to the indoor bees. It is than passed mouth to mouth, from bee to bee until it's moisture content is reduced from about 70% to 20%. This is the process that changes nectar into a honey!
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| Storage cells with honey inside of them |
Finally, the honey is placed in storage cells and capped with beeswax in readiness for the arrival of newborn baby bees.
Beekeeping
Humans have kept honey bee colonies, commonly in hives, for millennia. Beekeepers collect honey, beeswax, propolis, pollen, and royal jelly from hives; bees are also kept to pollinate crops and to produce bees for sale to other beekeepers.
Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date to 15,000 years ago; efforts to domesticate them are shown in Egyptian art around 4,500 years ago.
From the 18th century, European understanding of the colonies and biology of bees allowed the construction of the moveable comb hive so that honey could be harvested without destroying the colony.
Apiaries, also called a bee yard, are a location where beehives of honey bees are kept.
They come in many different sizes and shapes and usually are placed on high grounds in order to avoid moisture collection.
Many times they are situated close to orchards, farms, and public gardens, which require frequent pollination to develop a positive feedback loop between the bees and their food sources.
Ecological importance of bees
Bees are pollinators which means that they help spread pollen from male part of the flower to the stigma, which is female part of the flower. This way they have a key role in securing survival of many plant species, and if we take in account that over 80% of the flowering plants depend on insect pollination, their ecological significance grows even more!
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| Bee collecting nectar and at the same time participating in pollination |
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