ALERT:  Because of a mite infecting wild honeybee colonies, wild bees are in danger of disappearing!  Possibly 90% of the wild colonies are gone!

Bees are vital to our food chains because they pollinate 1/3 of the food we eat, including many fruits and vegetables.

Farming practices and urban development are taking away some of the natural habitats of the honeybees.

Beekeepers are helping honeybees to thrive in domestic beehives.  Because of the lack of wild honeybees, some beekeepers move their boxes from orchard to orchard to help pollinate the fruit trees.
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Beehives are usually wooden boxes with several layers.

The super is a box with 10 movable frames. Each frame holds sheets of wax called a foundation.  In nature, this area would be what we call the honeycomb.

Worker bees build 6-sided cells on these frames where the queen can lay her eggs, the larvae can grow, the nectar can be stored and turned into honey. Worker bees keep this level very busy.

The area of the honeybee "nursery" is kept at about 95 degrees F. and 50% relative humidity.  Worker bees bring in drops of water and fan their wings to cool and humidify the brooding area.  In winter, before the queen begins to lay eggs again, they huddle together to maintain a warm living area for the colony to survive the winter weather.
 

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Above this bottom super, the beekeeper places a queen excluder and then more supers.  The queen excluder has a hole in it that is large enough for a worker bee to crawl through, but too small for the queen to crawl through. The worker bees crawl through the opening to place more nectar in the cells, but the queen can not crawl through to lay more eggs. These supers are for the beekeeper to harvest honey and wax. This honey and wax is then processed for humans to use.

As each super fills up, the beekeeper can place another super on top.  Worker bees will fill cells with nectar and produce honey as long as the weather is good, the flowers with nectar are plentiful, and there are enough workers.

On the top of the hive the beekeeper places an inner and outer cover.  This keeps the bees' workplace clean and protected, but can be removed for taking the honey and wax at harvest time.

During the winter, beekeepers must keep the beehive warm and dry.  The worker bees do a lot of this themselves, by pressing together and maintaining body heat, but in colder climates, some beekeepers cover the hive with black plastic to hold in the heat.

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The beehive can have only 1 queen.  But it can have between 15,000 and 50,000 worker bees.  There will be perhaps 100 drones in the hive, but only in the summer.  In the winter, the drones are forced out of the hive, because they do no work to help the colony in the winter.

The queen can lay between 1500 and 3000 eggs a day starting in February and continuing through the summer.

The queen can live for as much as 3 or 4 years, but the worker lives only 4 to 6 weeks in the summer or 4 to 6 months in the winter.  Worker bees live longer in the winter to be sure the colony survives into the next summer season. After all, they are doing most of the maintenance work in the hive.

The worker can forage as far as 4 to 6 miles from the hive.  She can fly as fast as 25 mph.  But in her whole foraging life she will only produce less than 1/4 teaspoon of honey!

To produce a pound of honey, bees must travel 55,000 miles and visit 2,000,000 flowers!

When the hive becomes too full of bees, the workers make special cells for new queens.  They feed these larvae on special food called royal jelly.  Then the old queen flies out of the hive with about 1/2 of the bees following her.  They will find a new place to live. The rest of the bees remain behind to nurse the new queen when she is born and to help the old colony develop again.

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Honeybees by the Number

The honeybee colony has:
1 reproductive female, the Queen.  She lays
2 types of eggs, male & female.  These become
3 casts of insect: drone, worker, & queen.  They have
4 wings,
5 eyes,
6 legs, &
7 sub-brains, or nerve centers, called ganglia.  This wonderful insect is killed by
8 legged mites, in more than
9 out of
10 cases.

by Stan Umlauft  1995