Getting acquainted with the two female castes and the male
My first introduction to life inside the honey bee hive occurred many years ago during a school assembly. I was about 10 years old. My classmates and I were shown a wonderful movie about the secret inner workings of the beehive. The film mesmerized me. I’d never seen anything so remarkable and fascinating. How could a bug be so smart and industrious? I couldn’t help being captivated by the bountiful honey bee. That brief childhood event planted a seed that blossomed into a treasured hobby decades later.
Anyone who knows even a little bit about the honey bee can’t help but be amazed, because far more goes on within the hive than most people can ever imagine: complex communication, social interactions, teamwork, unique jobs and responsibilities, food gathering, and the engineering of one of the most impressive living quarters found in nature. Whether you’re a newcomer or an old hand, you’ll have many opportunities to experience firsthand the miracle of beekeeping. Every time you visit your bees, you’ll see something new. But you’ll get far more out of your new hobby if you understand more about what you’re looking at. What are the physical components of the bee that enable it to do its job so effectively? What are those bees up to and why? What’s normal and what’s not normal? What is a honey bee, and what is an imposter? In this chapter, you take a peek within a typical colony of honey bees.
Basic Body Parts
Everyone knows about at least one part of the honey bee’s anatomy: its stinger. But you’ll get more out of beekeeping if you understand a little bit about the other parts that make up the honey bee. I don’t go into this in textbook-detail — I just show you a few basic parts to help you understand what makes honey bees tick. Figure 2-1 shows the basic parts of the worker bee.
Courtesy of Howland Blackiston
FIGURE 2-1: This is how a honey bee looks if you shave off all the hairs. Several important body features are labeled.
Skeleton
Like all insects, the honey bee’s skeleton is on the outside. This arrangement is called an exoskeleton. On the outside, nearly the entire bee is covered with branched hairs (like the needles on the branch of a spruce tree). Yes, the hairs help keep the bee body warm, but they also do much more. A bee can “feel” with these hairs, and the hairs serve the bee well when it comes to pollination because pollen sticks well to the branched hairs.
Head
The honey bee’s head is flat and somewhat triangular in shape. Here’s where you find the bee’s brain and primary sensory organs (sight, feel, taste, and smell). It’s also where you find important glands that produce royal jelly and some of the various chemical pheromones used for communication. Figure 2-2 compares the heads of a worker, drone, and queen.
Courtesy of Howland Blackiston
FIGURE 2-2: Comparing the heads of worker, drone, and queen bees. Note the worker bee’s extra-long proboscis and the drone’s huge, wraparound eyes.
Royal jelly is a substance secreted from glands in a worker bee’s head and is used as a food to feed brood.
The important parts of the bee’s head are its
Eyes: The head includes two large, compound eyes that are used for general-distance sight, and three small, simple eyes, called ocelli, which are used in the poor light conditions within the hive. Notice the three simple eyes (ocelli) on all three bee types Figure 2-2, while the huge, wraparound, compound eyes of the drone make him easy to identify. The queen’s eyes, are slightly smaller than the worker bee’s and much smaller than the drone’s.
Antennae: The honey bee has two elbowed antennae on the front of its face. Each antenna has thousands of tiny sensors that detect smell (like a nose does). The bee uses this sense of smell to identify flowers, water, the colony, and maybe even you! The antennae also, like the branched hairs mentioned earlier, feel, detect moisture, measure distance when bees fly, and help the bee detect up and down, among other functions.
Mouth parts: The bees’ mandibles (jaws) are used for feeding larvae, collecting pollen, manipulating wax, and carrying things.
Proboscis: Everyone’s familiar with those noisemakers that show up at birthday and New Year’s Eve parties. You know, the ones that unroll when you toot them! The bee’s proboscis is much like those party favors, only without the “toot.” When the bee is at rest, this organ is retracted and not visible. But when the bee is feeding or drinking, it unfolds and two basic parts to form a long tube that the bee uses like a straw.
Thorax
The middle part of the bee is the thorax. It is the segment between the head and the abdomen where the two pairs of wings and six legs are anchored.
Wings: Here’s a trivia question for your next party: How many wings does a honey bee have? The answer is four. Two pairs are attached fore and aft to the bee’s thorax. The wings are hooked together in flight and separate when the bee is at rest.
Legs: The bee’s three pairs of legs are all different. Each leg has multiple segments that make the legs quite flexible. Bees also have taste receptors on the tips of their legs. The bee uses its forward-most legs to clean its antennae. The middle legs help with walking and are used to pack loads of pollen (and sometimes propolis) onto the pollen baskets that are part of the hind legs. Propolis is the sticky, resinous substance that the bees collect from the buds of trees and use to seal up cracks in the hive. Propolis can be harvested and used for a variety of nifty products. (For more information on propolis and what you can do with it, see Chapter 18.) The hind legs (see Figure 2-3) are specialized on the worker bee. They contain special combs and a pollen press, which are used by the worker bee to brush, collect, pack, and carry pollen and propolis back to the hive. Take a moment to closely watch a foraging bee on a flower. You’ll see her hind legs heavily loaded with pollen for the return trip home.
Spiracles: These tiny holes along the sides of a bee’s thorax and abdomen are the means by which a bee breathes. The bee’s trachea (breathing tubes) are attached to these spiracles. Tracheal mites gain access to the trachea through the first hole in the thorax. These mites are a problem for bees; you find out how to deal with tracheal mites in Chapter 13.
Courtesy of Dr. Eric Erickson, Jr.