Girl Bees At Work
Girl Bees At Work
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Courtesy of Howland Blackiston
The Colony
The Colony
A single colony of bees lives in 1 beehive.
The population of a bee colony actually includes two different female castes (the queen and the workers) and the male bees (drones).
The Queen
The Queen
Is an egg-laying machine, capable of producing more than 2,000 eggs a day at 30-second intervals. 1 queen per colony.
The Workers
The Workers
They raise new bees (their brothers and sisters). They make the wax honeycomb. They defend the hive. They make royal jelly to feed the young and rear new queens. They store pollen and make bee bread to feed the young. They forage for pollen, nectar, and resin to make propolis. They clean the hive. They are all sisters or half sisters, and are all daughters of the queen. They can lay unfertilized eggs that can only become drones, and carry out all major work in the hive.
So Yes, Only Girl Honey bees Make Honey
The Drone
The Drone
He doesn’t forage for food from flowers — he has no pollen baskets. He doesn’t help with the building of comb — he has no wax-producing glands. Nor can he help defend the hive — he has no stinger. He is not the queen or a worker — merely the drone. His job? He mates. Procreation is the drone’s primary purpose in life, and they die immediately after mating with a virgin queen from a different colony.
Infographics from the Web
Worker Honey Bees have different jobs that evolve as they get older. Interestingly, if something happens to the hive, these bees remember how to do their old jobs and can aid as needed.
Left) A female worker bee can only lay unfertilized eggs to produce drones. She never mates.
Middle) only Queen bees can lay fertilized eggs to become worker bees or future Queens. This means all the female bees in the hive are sisters because the Queen is thier mother and potentially have the same or different fathers.
Right) The Queen lays unfertilized eggs to become drones (male bees). They only carry genes from the Queen, and have no father. They leave the hive to mate with a queen from a different hive to areas called drone congregation zones.
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