Bee Behavior

Bee behavior

Honeybees are creatures of instinct. Believe it or not, these can only be trained to utilize man-made equipment if it satisfies an instinctive need. Understanding how bees live and work in order to produce and store honey is what makes beekeeping a fascinating and rewarding agricultural quest.

Division of labor

Honeybees are social insects and each member of the hive has particular duties assigned according to sexual and physiological diversity in the three types of members.

The drone is male and exists for the sole purpose of meeting with a queen. Drones meet with between seven and 21 drones during the first three days of their lives. Following the rare opportunity of meeting with the Queen, drones lose their reproductive organs inside the Queen and fall to their death. Drones do not have stingers to protect the colony or a long enough proboscis (tongues) to forage for resources.

The Queen

Queens are only fertile in the first three days of their life at which time they exit the hive to complete mating flights. After these initial days the Queen’s sole occupation is laying up to 2000 eggs a day for up to seven years provided they live that long.

The Worker

Worker bees are females born from a fertilized egg laid by a queen. Workers incubate the eggs, keeping them nursed and protected. The workers complete all other duties in the hive. During the busiest time of the season, workers live only 5 to 6 weeks. For nearly the first three weeks of a worker’s life, their main job is to care for the young as a nurse bee and keep the hive clean. The subsequent days are spent secreting wax to build honeycomb, foraging for nectar, pollen, water, and tree sap and finally protecting the colony. Workers are not born with potent venom. Venom is most potent at the end of their lives. When there is a shortage of workers for any given job in the colony, workers are recruited from their current duty. Some researchers claim that workers as little as eight days old are able to perform any of the required colony duties.

AGE	Duties:
1-3 days	Bees are fed by other bees. They clean the brood cells and wander on the brood to help keep it warm.
3-6 days	Bees feed pollen and honey to the older larva, which are not more than two days under the age of ceiling for the pupa stage.
5-6 days	Brood glands become functional and orientation flights are taken during the ladder part of this period.
12-18 days	The wax glands develop and primary jobs include building honeycomb, cleaning the hive, and carrying out debris to include deceased bees and wax crumbs.
18-20 days	Worker bees become guards and at about three weeks of age they are foraging field bees.

Wax Secretion and Manipulation of Wax Scales

Workers who are actively engaged in wax secretion gorge on honey and hang very quietly in chains at or near their building site. Their organs digest and secretion transforms their honey sack contents into energy and beeswax. It takes about 24 hours for the honey to be processed and the wax to be sculpted into honeycomb.

Wax is secreted by wax glands on the underside of the abdomen. The plates covering the glands are called the “sterna” (singular: “sternum”). The overlapping sterna 4, 5, 6, and 7 each have two smooth glistening mirrors. The wax flows onto the mirrors in a liquid form and hardens to create small flakes between the mirrors and the overlapping sterna parts.

Unless lost by accident, wax scales are always removed from the worker “pockets” and manipulated by the same bee that secretes them. Scales that are dropped can be recovered by other workers. Scales are forked out of the worker’s pockets by spines or combs by one of the hind “tarsi”. When the scale is being held, the bee uses its hind leg to flex the scale towards the mouth, where it can be grasped by the forelegs or the mandibles. Bees do not seem to follow any sequence when removing scales from the eight pockets.

Number of trips per day

The number of trips a foraging worker bee makes in a day depends on how far their traveling. Researchers believe each bee makes 5 to 15 trips per day. Honeybees gathering pollen may make many more trips per day if the pollen is available all day long. Water collectors make hundreds of trips per day.

Foraging Area

The number of flowers would you be must visit to obtain a load varies considerably. Bees have been known to obtain a load from a single species such as poplar. When fireweed is yielding its maximum less than 10 flowers are necessary to produce a load. Researchers have found these visiting in excess of 1000 flowers in one trip which required over two hours so bees visit anywhere from 50 to 1000 flowers per trip. Foraging visits can be focused to one plant although often its usually focused on multiple plants over several hundred square feet. Individual bees generally devote most of visits in a day to a single fruit tree.

Crop Constancy

Researchers have found fewer than 3% of field bees visit more than one plant species on a trip when a specific species in a foraging area begins to fail to yield an acceptable amount of nectar a worker will shift her efforts to another source and possibly even another species of flower. Often workers will recheck in original nectar source multiple times even if she may be foraging in another direction and on a different species of plant.

Mating Behavior

Queens have a short window of fertility within the first week of their lives. They may mate for several consecutive days making more than one flight on any given day. Drones actually start venturing on mating flights when their 8 to 10 days old. Queens and drones both complete mating flights only in the afternoon they fly for 5 to 30 minutes or more each trip and queens can mate with drones located up to 10 or 13 km away.

Source: D.F. Peer, Nipawin, Sask. Alberta Agriculture. Agdex 616-9. Revised April 1978.