The Worker Bee

The largest population of the colony is the worker, normally numbering

in the hundreds of thousands in an established colony. Many tasks are
performed by workers which are necessary for the colonies survival.
These duties occur relative to the bee's age.  The freshly uncapped
workers perform "In-hive" tasks, such as feeding and capping over
larva, storing both nectar and pollen from the foraging bees, returning
from the fields, general hive cleaning and much more. Note: all these
inner hive tasks are performed in total darkness.

As the worker bee ages, her duties move toward the hive's entrance. She will continue to collect
nectar from returning field bees, do guard duties and fan the hive for ventilation. Finally around
her third week of life, she will take short orientation flights to strengthen her wings and
familiarize herself with the location of her home. She will be fully aware of her homes location
and fly miles each day collecting pollen and nectar from plants, trees and flowers. She will
literally touchdown thousands of times each day pollinating the fruits and vegetables that we eat.

In her foraging life, a mere 2 weeks, she will fly over 400 miles. Literally wearing out her wings
to the point where flying is no longer possible. At this point, only 5 weeks into her short life, the
worker bee will walk away from the hive, thus no longer being a burden to the colony. She dies
shortly after.

The Queen
The queen is an amazing egg laying machine. She is selected to be
a queen when she is either an egg or a very young Larva. Worker
bees realize the need for a new queen and they choose several
eggs or larva and begin preparing them to be queens. The reason
may vary, but generally the colony either has a failing queen, or
the colony plans to swarm, or the existing queen was somehow
killed. No matter the reason, raising a new queen is a fight against
time if the colony is queenless and many colonies have failed in a
last attempt at queen replacement.

Visually the queen is very similar to the worker. Her body is noticeably paler though, with less
pronounced stripes on the abdomen. Also, she has a bald spot just behind her head on the area
called the thorax, where the 6 legs and 4 wings attach. Many beekeepers mark the queen with a
colored dot so that she will stand out in the hive. The dot is color coded to show the year the
queen was first used.
The queen is fed a glandular substance from worker bees called Royal Jelly throughout her larva
stage. The she is sealed up by the workers and 16 days later she emerges a fully developed
queen, ready to mate within days.

Somewhere around her third day of life, she leaves the colony to mate with as many as 10 or 12
drones. The mating takes place " in flight " and the drones, who leave their sex organs inside of
the queen,  die shortly afterwards. The newly mated queen returns home and begins laying eggs
at a rate of 1500 to 2500 eggs a day for a period of up to 5 years.

As the queen moves throughout the hive, She encircled by a group of workers known as the
Royal Court. The Royal Court actually comprises nearly every bee in the colony, each taking
turns surrounding and assisting her, feeding the queen, touching her and spreading her scent
throughout the hive by rubbing their antennas over the queen. At any time a dozen or so workers
will aid the queen, but eventually all the workers make their way to touch and assist the queen in
her endless duties as the "egg layer" of the hive.

The Drone
The typical colony has only a few hundred Drones. They are not
productive to the colonies survival and are only kept for emergency
mating purposes. They are stingless and unclean, fowling the colony
with their waste. Workers constantly remove the waste from the hive
and keep it extremely sterile. Drones are fat and hairy and nearly twice
the size of the workers. 

During the Fall, the most bizarre hive activity occurs. Worker bees,
which are half the size and weight of the Drones, pick up the larger
Drones, carry them to the entrance and toss them to the ground. When the Drones try to return,
the guard bees prevent them from re-entering. Eventually they give up and go looking for other
colonies and other queens to mate with. The life expectancy of the Drone is long enough for this
new season's freshly hatched workers to take over the many tasks. Then these Wintered workers
simply die off and completing a cycle that has gone on for millions of years.

Not shown in this drawing is the spined rear leg where pollen is packed for the flight back to the
colony. Look at the top of this page for a good view of the pollen spine. Also, notice that the
heart runs across the top, and the full length of the workers abdomen. It is shown in read here in
red.

Honeybees have 5 eyes. There are three "simple eyes" on top of the bee's forehead, which
basically determine where "UP" is, in relationship to everything else. These "simple eyes" really
don't see anything. 

The other two eyes can easily be seen when looking at the bees. They are faceted and actually
see things in 9000 small mosaic pieces. Their brains put the information together to form the
simple pictures. A good Beekeeper uses the bee's mosaic vision to the Beekeeper's advantage.
We learn early on that slow movements around the bees are hardly notices. It's swift and jerky
swinging of the arms that will get you stung.

The honeybee's antenna is used for smelling, much like the hairs in our noses. They have four
wings attached to the same section of the body as the 6 legs - the Thorax.
 

Observing Bee-havior
The most important part of beekeeping is watching you bees. You can avert lots of trouble by
closely observing the activity both inside and outside of the hive. Social creatures behave in
predetermined ways that are instinctual, so knowing a particular behavior should also trigger a
given response or series of responses. All the activity of your colonies should be logged and
carefully described for future reference by you.

Anyone reading the detailed log entries of my  Beemaster's Digital Logbook will see that it helps
to talk-out the observations. Coming to credible conclusions to particular behavior can often
mean the difference between success and failure in Wintering your bees. But conclusions are like
belly buttons, we all have one but they are all a little different. Two experienced beekeepers can
watch the same behaviors and draw two different conclusions. One will be right and the other
will be wrong. 

Who is right? The person who better interpreted what they had seen. The success is in the
observation and the observation came with experience. But without talking out the observations
to yourself or even better sharing it with other beekeepers, you will never draw the right
conclusion and your intervention with the hive may not be what was needed and the hive could
suffer from it.

I'll cover all the details of observation in its own section soon. But I need you to understand that
logging your activity and the behavior of the bees is crucial to the successful raising and over-
Wintering of the colonies. More than 40% of colonies fail each Winter across the United States,
mostly due to reasons beyond our control. That's 4 out of 10 colonies that we can't save, the
remaining 60% is within our control and their success rate is a barometer to our interactiveness
with the colonies. Settling for 60% survival is not acceptable either, we should always try to
Winter 100% of our colonies no matter what statistics claim. 
 

There are four different species of honeybee in the world:

The Little Honeybee (Apis florea) - native to southeast Asia

 The Eastern Honeybee (Apis cerana) - native to eastern Asia as far north as Korea
& Japan

The Giant Honeybee (Apis dorsata) - native to southeast Asia

The Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera) - native to Europe, Africa and western
Asia

Cave paintings in Europe indicate that early peoples were harvesting honey 8,000
years ago.  The next step in human/honeybee relations came when people started
keeping bees in man-made structures rather than just going out and searching for
wild hives.  The ancient Egyptians were beekeepers and their methods were copied
throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East.  They used the Western
Honeybee, and that is the most widely used species today.  The Eastern Honeybee
was also domesticated long ago in China.  The other two species of honeybee do not
nest in cavities and so were not suited to being put into hives.  The subject of
beekeeping is beyond the scope of this web page.  For more information, see the
links below.

Honeybee Communication
The domestic honeybee, Apis mellifera, is a colonial insect living in
hives containing

 one queen — a fertile female

 a few drones (males)
 thousands of workers (infertile females)

The workers are responsible for:

 keeping the hive clean

 building the wax combs of the hive
 tending the young and, when they get older (and when their
for gene gets turned on — Link),
 foraging for food: nectar and pollen

Link to a page describing the anatomy and life of the bee. This page
will examine how foragers communicate the distance and direction
of food.
When food is discovered by "scout" workers, they return to the hive. Shortly after their return,
many foragers leave the hive and fly directly to the food. The remarkable thing about this is that
the foragers do not follow the scouts back (the scouts may remain in the hive for hours). So the
scout bees have communicated to the foragers the necessary information for them to find the
food on their own.

It turns out that the scouts can convey to the foragers information about

 the odor of the food

 its direction from the hive
 its distance from the hive

Distance
When food is within 50–75 meters of the hive, the scouts dance
the "round dance" on the surface of the comb (left).

But when the food is farther than 75 meters from the hive, the
scouts dance the "waggle dance" (right).

The waggle dance has two components:

 a straight run — the direction of which conveys information about the direction of the food
 the speed at which the dance is repeated which indicates how far away the food is.

The graph shows the relationship between the

speed of the dance and the distance to the
food. It is based on data collected by the
German ethologist Karl von Frisch. It was he
who discovered much of what we know today
about honeybee communication (and was
honored with a Nobel Prize in 1973).

How do the bees calculate distance?

von Frisch thought they measured the

distance by assessing the amount of energy it
took to get there. But the mechanism turns out
to be quite different.

The bees measure distance by the motion of

images received by their eyes as they fly.

Honeybees, like all insects, have compound eyes. These give little information about depth but
are very sensitive to "flicker effect".
It has long been known to bee keepers that honeybees respond better to flowers

 moving in the breeze

 with complex petals

The importance of flicker effect can be demonstrated by

training honeybees to visit food placed on cards with
patterns. For example, the bees can distinguish any figure in
the top row from any figure in the bottom row more easily
than they can distinguish between any of the figures in
either row.

Some Evidence

Working at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana), Esch and Burns found that when the hive
and food were placed on top of tall (50 m) buildings, the speed of the waggle dance indicated a
distance only half of the distance indicated by bees travelling the same distance (230 m) at
ground level. Features of the scenery pass the retina faster when near than when far (compare the
changes in your view from an airliner at cruising altitude and as it approaches the runway).

Tests of Searching Behavior

Working at the Australian National University,

Srinivasan and his colleagues built tunnels decorating
the interior walls with patterns to create flicker.

In these three experiments, the bees were first fed in

the middle of the tunnel of standard diameter. Then
the food was removed.

1. Using the same tunnel, foragers came to same

spot in the tunnel.

2. Using a narrower tunnel, foragers began

searching for food near its entrance. Forced to fly
closer to the vertical stripes, the images moved by
faster.

3. Using a tunnel with a larger diameter, foragers

searched for food at its far end. Flying farther from the stripes, the images moved by more
slowly.

Tests of Dancing Behavior

All tunnels were 6 meters long and located 35 meters from the hive — well within the distance
(50–75 m) that normally elicits the round dance.

1. Bees were fed at the entrance. Back at the hive, they danced the round dance as you would
expect.

2. Bees fed at end of tunnel. Back at the hive, they danced the waggle dance. Even though the
total distance from the hive (41 m) was still well within the "round" range, the complexity of the
scenery passed in the last 6 m, elicited the waggle dance.

3. Bees fed at end of tunnel decorated with horizontal stripes. These created no flicker as the
bees flew, and on their return to the hive they danced the round dance.

You can read about this second set of experiments in Srinivasan, et. al., Science, 4 February 2000.

Recruits respond to the misinformation given by returning scouts.

More recently, the Esch and Srinivasan groups have teamed up to show that naive foragers are
fooled by the misinformation that the returning scouts give them. When scouts were fed only 11
m from the hive but at the far end of a striped tunnel, they danced the waggle dance back at the
hive as though the food had been 70 m away. Most of the workers they recruited flew out
(bypassing the tunnel) 70 m looking for food.

You can read about these experiments in Ungless, et. al., Nature, 31 May 2001.

Direction
By itself, the knowledge that food is 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) away is not very useful. But von Frisch also
noted that the direction of the straight portion of the waggle dance varied with the direction of the food
source from the hive and the time of day.

 At any one time, the direction changes with the location of the food.
 With a fixed source of food, the direction changes by the same angle as the sun during its
passage through the sky.

But

 The sun is not visible within the hive.

 The scouts dance on the vertical surface of the combs.

How, then, do they translate flight angles in the darkened hive?

The figure shows how.

 Relationship between the angle of the dance on the vertical comb and the bearing
of the sun with respect to the location of food.

When the food and sun are in the same direction, the straight portion of the
waggle dance is directed upward.

When the food is at some angle to the right (blue) or left (red) of the sun, the
bee orients the straight portion of her dance at the same angle to the right or
left of the vertical.

Using radar to track individual bees recruited by the waggle dance, Riley, J. R., et al., (Nature,
12 May 2005) have shown that the recruits do fly in the indicated direction. They even adjust
their flight path to compensate for being blown off course by the wind. However, their course is
seldom so precise that they can find the food without the aid of vision and/or smell as they
neared it.

Other features:
Time Sense

When scouts remain in the hive for a long period, they shift the direction of the straight portion
of the waggle dance as the day wears on (and the direction of the sun shifts). But they cannot see
the sun in the darkened hive. Evidently, they are "aware" of the passing time and make the
necessary corrections.
The time sense of
honeybees has long been
known to people who have
sweet snacks in their
garden at a set time every
day. Within minutes of the
regular time, foraging bees
arrive for their share of the
jam.

The speed of the bee's clock

seems to be related to its
metabolic rate. If normally
punctual bees are

 chilled (to lower

their metabolic rate)
or
 exposed to an anesthetizing concentration of carbon dioxide

they arrive late to the picnic table (graph at right).

Polarized light

von Frisch also discovered that scouts (and foragers) don't actually have to see the sun to navigate. As
long as they can see a small patch of clear blue sky, they get along fine. This is because sky light is
partially polarized, and the plane of polarization in any part of the sky is determined by the location of
the sun. Try it by rotating a pair of polaroid® sun glasses!

Swarming

Before a new queen emerges, the old queen leaves the hive, taking many of the workers with her. The
swarm usually settles somewhere, e.g., on a tree branch, while scouts go searching for a new home.

Each scout that finds a promising site, returns to the swarm and dances on it just as though she
had found food. Eventually, the swarm departs for the location promoted most vigorously.

Grooming

Workers have another type of dance — rapidly vibrating from side to side — that tells other
workers that she needs help removing dust, pollen, etc. from hard-to-reach places on her body.

Welcome&Next Search 8 December 2010