14 DAY TRIAL // 1. The oldest known bee was found in amber coming from Myanmar: 100 million years old! This was during the Cretaceous, the last dinosaur era, and Melittosphex shared both bee and wasp traits. The honey bees (genus Apis) originated in southern Asia and only one species, Apis melifera, is found also in Europe and Africa (honeybees are introduced in America and Australia). In India, for example, are three different honey bee species: Apis dorsata (giant honey bee), Apis cerana (eastern honey bee), and Apis florea (swarf honey bee).
Only the common honeybee nests in natural or artificial cavities. The Asian species have open nests. Apis dorsata is aggressive, and has powerful venom. It makes nests on the branches, 0.75-1 m (2.4-3.3 ft) wide. Apis florea is small and makes nest of just 8-12 cm (3.5-5 in) in diameter.
The infamous killer bee is just an African race of the common honey bee, Apis melifera adansoni. They too produce honey, even more than the other races employed in apiculture. But they are hyper-aggressive, being more likely to attack a perceived threat and, when they do so, attack relentlessly in larger numbers for much longer distances. Researchers believe they got this aggressiveness through selection, as along the centuries Africans smoked the hives to get to the honey, and only the most aggressive bees survived.
The killer bees were brought in 1956 in Sao Paolo (Brazil) in an attempt to create a bee producing higher amounts of honey. They escaped and started to replace the local type of honey bees, brought from Europe and Mediterranean (Apis mellifera caucasica and Apis mellifera ligustica). The queen of the killer bees usually replaces the queen of a more peaceful type in the hive, and its offspring inherit the aggressiveness genes. In Venezuela, the killer bee invasion dwindled honey production by 6 times in the '80s.
The greatest issue is that 30 % of the crop production is ensured by pollinating honey bees. The honey bee is in fact the most important pollinator for humans. Bees have the habit of visiting just the nectar of one species found in abundance around the hive, that's why apicultors are paid by farmers to install their hives in almond, apple, pear, plum, cherry or kiwi plantations. But the killer bee cannot be used in pollination management. We can live without honey, but not without fruits.
From Brazil the killer bees expanded gradually northward and by 1985 entered Nicaragua, and in 1987 Mexico. By 1990 entered Texas, and by January 2007 they reached the New Orleans area. By now, all the southwestern US is colonized.
2. A honey bee colony is made of 2,500 males (drones), one female queen (the only fertile one) and 30,000 female sterile workers. The workers live 38 days during the summer, and 6 months during the winter. The drone lives 22 days and the queen 4-5 years (!) (that's why scientists looking to prolong human life are attempting to understand what causes such discrepancies in lifespan between bee queen and workers).
At a given moment, a colony can contain 6,000 eggs, 9,000 larvae and 20,000 pupae, depending on external factors (food supply, clime, diseases) and the queen. The queen controls the workers through pheromones.
3. A 12-19 days old bee produces wax through 8 wax glands. 40 grams of wax support 2 kg (4.5 pounds) of honey. One bee produces 0.0008 grams of wax, which means 1,250,000 bees are required for producing one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of wax. The antennae are used as trowel when constructing the combs.
4. A bee has a 6.5 mm "trunk" and a 2 mm "tongue". The goiter can store 75 milligrams of nectar, and to be filled, a bee must visit for example 1,000-1,500 flowers of trefoil. To gather one liter of nectar, bees must effectuate 20,000-100,000 flights.
The third pair of feet has "baskets", and the first pair of feet has a pollen brush. With the foot's "baskets", a 82 milligrams heavy bee can transport 50 mg of pollen. The propolis is gathered from the buds of willows and poplars, mixed with pollen and saliva and used for fixing the combs or wrapping killed predators. Bees drink water, necessary for making the honey and raising the larvae.
Honey contains 85 % sugar, water, mineral salts and vitamins. Inside the bee's goiter the sugar from the honey is turned into glucose and fructose, just like what human body does inside the gut.
5. A bee indicates to the other bees through "dancing" the distance and the location (based on the angle to the sun) of a place rich in food. The dancing makes an "8" line . The better the food source is, the more complicated and repeated the dance is.
6. During their first three weeks, the workers do not leave the hive. During their first three days, their mandibular and hypopharyngian glands produce "royal jelly" with which they feed the larvae. The larvae fed on this food form queens.
7. During the winter, the colony has about 40,000 workers. The bees form now a fatty organ. Under 8o C, bees die. When the temperature drops under 18o C, the bees gather around the queen for warming themselves, and by fluttering their wings, they burn fats releasing heat. In the middle of the group, the temperature is of 35o C.
During the winter, the bees eat honey, but do not eliminate dejections.
8. After 15 of January, the queen starts laying eggs. When a queen hatches, kills the other "queen" larvae. If several queen pupae hatch at a time, the queens will start to fight. They are sexually mature at 6 days. The drones mature in 5-16 days.
During the spring takes places the swarming, when new colonies are formed. The queens go out when the temperatures are over 20o C and there's no wind. One queen mates with 5-6 males in flight at 6-20 m (20-66 ft) off the ground. The female stores the sperm in a spermatheca. In honeybees, the drones are 1.5 cm long, the queen 1.8-2 cm, and the workers 1.4-1.5 cm.
Each comb cell harbors one egg. The bigger ones harbor male larvae. The wax tap is permeable to air.
The queen lays one egg at 40 seconds (1,500-3,000 daily), which is 1.5 mm x 0.5 mm. Workers hatch from fecundated eggs, males from non-fecundated eggs. The larvae hatch in the third day, and metamorphosize in 4-6 days.
The drones are inactive, they live between April to September, after which are expelled from the colony and die of hunger and cold. They just play a role in fecundation.
9. Bees breathe through 20 stigmata (respiratory openings), 3 pairs on the thorax, and 7 on the abdomen. They have 3 ocelli, and two compound eyes that give them a visual field of 360o. The visual sharpness is 80 % of the human one. Bee can see 300 images per second (over 10 times more than us), and are sensitive to yellow-orange specter (which we see yellow-orange-green), blue-green specter (non-corespondent to humans) and UV light (invisible to us).
The compound eyes are made of ommatidia, and each ommatidium is made of 8 sensory cells. The ocellu work like photoelectric cells, measuring the intensity of the light.
Bees taste with the mouth, tip of the feet and antennae. Their sensitivity is different from that of the human: lactose (the sugar from the milk) is not sweat for them. The antennae are involved in smelling (drones can perceive 30,000 scents, workers 3,000) and vibration perception, but these insects are deaf.
The smell helps bees recognize individuals from the same colony, and induce in the African killer bees the sensitivity to carbon dioxide from the breath of the intruders. When dancing in the dark, bees use tactile, auditory and smelling clues.
10.With all their venom, bees are preyed upon by bee eaters, woodpeckers (during the winter), dragonflies, spiders, and other insects specialized in bees. Their most severe bee diseases are induced by fungi (Nosema, Aspergillus) and mites (Varroa). The colonies can be parasitised by a moth (Galleria mellonella, wax worms) and bee louse (Braula caeca, in fact a fly).
Varroa is like a "bee HIV". Similarly to HIV, it emerged in 1982, in France, and an infested hive dies in 4 years. Varroa was originally a parasite of Apis cerana. But Apis cerana is extremely clean and uses to cleanse itself often, eliminating the parasite, while the honey bee does nothing to get rid of the parasite. As said, Varroa has passed on the honey bee for a few decades. Using pesticides against this parasite is impossible, as they would poison the honey. Researchers are looking for ecological solutions, like using natural enemies of the mite.
11. In bumble bees (genus Bombus) from Europe and America, the colony dies in fall, a the female overcomes alone the winter (6-8 months). In the spring, she creates a new underground colony. Bumble bees from warm areas form permanent colonies.
12. The only native American bees that entered in apiculture, before the European colonization of the Americas, were some stingless bees from the genera Melipona and Trigona, grown by the Mayan tribes just for honey. Maya people even venerated a bee-god, named Ah Muzen Cab.
Many Australian Aborigines, Amerindian and African tribes also hunt for stingless bee honey.