Western honeybee
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The Western honeybee or European honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a species of honeybee comprised of several subspecies or races. "Mellifera" is from the Latin, and means honey-carrying - hence "Apis mellifera" is the honey-carrying bee. The name was coined in 1758 by Carolus Linnaeus, though in a subsequent 1761 publication, he referred to it as mellifica; the older name has precedence, but some Europeans still utilize the incorrect subsequent spelling.
Biology
In the temperate zone, these honeybees survive winter as a colony, and the queen begins egg laying in mid to late winter, to prepare for spring. This is most likely triggered by longer day length. She is the only fertile female, and deposits all the eggs from which the other bees are produced. Except a brief mating period when she may make several flights to mate with drones, or if she leaves in later life with a swarm to establish a new colony, the queen rarely leaves the hive after the larvae have become full grown bees. The queen deposits each egg in a cell prepared by the worker bees. The egg hatches into a small larva which is fed by nurse bees (worker bees who maintain the interior of the colony). After about a week, the larva is sealed up in its cell by the nurse bees and begins the pupal stage. After another week, it will emerge an adult bee.The larvae and pupae in a frame of honeycomb are referred to as frames of brood and are often sold (with adhering bees) by beekeepers to other beekeepers to start new beehives.
Both workers and queens are fed royal jelly during the first three days of the larval stage. Then workers are switched to a diet of pollen and nectar or diluted honey, while those intended for queens will continue to receive royal jelly. This causes the larva to develop to the pupa stage more quickly, while being also larger and fully developed sexually. Queen breeders consider good nutrition during the larval stage to be of critical importance to the quality of the queens raised, good genetics and sufficient number of matings also being factors. During the larval and pupal stages, various parasites can attack the pupa/larva and destroy or damage it.
Queens are not raised in the typical horizontal brood cells of the honeycomb. The typical queen cell is specially constructed to be much larger, and has a vertical orientation. However, should the workers sense that the old queen is weakening, they will produce emergency cells known as supersedure cells. These cells are made from a cell with an egg or very young larva. These cells protrude from the comb. As the queen finishes her larval feeding, and pupates, she moves into a head downward position, from which she will later chew her way out of the cell. At pupation the workers cap or seal the cell. Just prior to emerging from their cells, young queens can often be heard "piping." The purpose of this sound is not yet fully understood.
Worker bees are infertile females, however in some circumstances they may lay infertile eggs, and in one subspecies these eggs may be fertile. Worker bees secrete the wax used to build the hive, clean and maintain the hive, raise the young, guard the hive and forage for nectar and pollen.
In honeybees, the worker bees have a modified ovipositor called a stinger with which they can sting to defend the hive, but unlike other bees (and even unlike the queens of their own species), the stinger is barbed. Contrary to popular belief, the bee will not always die soon after stinging: this is a misconception based on the fact that a bee will usually die after stinging a human or mammal; however, the stinger evolved primarily for inter-bee combat. When used on other kinds of larger animals, the stinger can get caught in the victim's skin or fur, and then cannot be withdrawn properly; the result is that the bee suffers serious injuries and eventually dies.
Drone bees are the male bees of the colony. Since they do not have ovipositors, they also do not have stingers. Drone honeybees do not forage for nectar or pollen. In some species, drones are suspected of playing a contributing role in the temperature regulation of the hive. The primary purpose of a drone bee is to fertilize a new queen. Multiple drones will mate with any given queen in flight, and each drone will die immediately after mating; the process of insemination requires a lethally convulsive effort.
Queens live for up to three years, while workers have an average life of only three months (during the foraging season, but longer in places with extended winters).
Honeybee queens release pheromones to regulate hive activities, and worker bees also produce pheromones for various communications (below).
Bees produce honey by collecting nectar, which is a clear liquid consisting of nearly 80% water with complex sugars. The collecting bees store the nectar in a second stomach and return to the hive where worker bees remove the nectar. The worker bees digest the raw nectar for about 30 minutes using enzymes to break up the complex sugars into simpler ones. Raw honey is then spread out in empty honeycomb cells to dry, which reduces the water content to less than 20%. When nectar is being processed, honeybees create a draft through the hive by fanning with their wings. Once dried, the cells of the honeycomb are sealed (capped) with wax to preserve the honey.
When a hive detects smoke, many bees become remarkably non aggressive. It is speculated that this is a defense mechanism; wild colonies generally live in hollow trees, and when bees detect smoke it is presumed that they prepare to evacuate from a forest fire, carrying as much food reserve as they can. In this state, defense from predation is relatively unimportant; saving as much as possible is the most important activity.
Honeybee queens
Periodically, the colony determines that a new queen is needed. There are three general triggers.- The colony becomes space-constrained because the hive is filled with honey, leaving little room for new eggs. This will trigger a swarm where the old queen will take about half the worker bees to found a new colony, leaving the new queen with the other half of worker bees to continue the old colony.
- The old queen begins to fail. This is thought to be recognized by a decrease in queen pheromones throughout the hive. This situation is called supersedure. At the end of the supersedure, the old queen is generally killed.
- The old queen dies suddenly. This is an emergency supersedure. The worker bees will find several eggs or larvae in the right age-range and attempt to develop them into queens. Emergency supersedure can generally be recognized because the queen cell is built out from a regular cell of the comb rather than hanging from the bottom of a frame.
When the virgin queen emerges, she is commonly thought to seek out other queen cells and sting the infant queens within and that should two queens emerge simultaneously, they will fight to the death. Recent studies, however, have indicated that colonies may maintain two queens in as many as 10% of hives. The mechanism by which this occurs is not yet known. Regardless, the queen asserts her control over the worker bees through the release of a complex suite of pheromones called queen scent.
After several days of orientation within and around the hive, the young queen flies to a drone congregation point - a site near a clearing and generally about 30 feet above the ground where the drones from different hives tend to congregate in a swirling aerial mass. Drones detect the presence of a queen in their congregation area by her smell, and then find her by sight and mate with her in midair (drones can be induced to mate with "dummy" queens if they have the queen pheromone applied). A queen will mate multiple times and may leave to mate several days in a row, weather permitting, until her spermathecea is full.
The queen lays all the eggs in a healthy colony. The number and pace of egg-laying is controlled by weather and availability of resources and by the characteristics of the specific race of honeybee. Honeybees queens generally begin to slow egg-laying in the early-fall and may even stop during the winter. Egg-laying will generally resume in late winter as soon as the days begin to get longer. Egg-laying generally peaks in the spring. At the height of the season, she may lay over 2500 eggs per day - more than her own body mass.
The queen fertilizes each egg as it is being laid using stored sperm from the spermatheca. The queen will occasionally not fertilize an egg. These eggs, having only half as many genes as the queen or the workers, develop into drones.
Honeybee pheromones
Honeybees use special pheromones, or chemical communication, for almost all behaviors of life. Such uses include (but are not limited to): mating, alarm, defense, orientation, kin and colony recognition, food production, and integration of colony activities. Pheromones are thus essential to honeybees for their survival.Learning and communication
- "The general story of the communication of the distance, the situation, and the direction of a food source by the dances of the returning (honeybee) worker bee on the vertical comb of the hive, has been known in general outline from the work of Karl von Frisch in the middle 1950s."
Subspecies originating in Europe
- Apis mellifera ligustica , classified by Spinola, 1806 - the Italian bee. The most commonly kept race in North America, South America and southern Europe. They are kept commercially all over the world. They are very gentle, not terribly inclined to swarm, and produce a large surplus of honey. They have few negative characteristics. Colonies tend to maintain larger populations through winter, so they require more winter stores (or feeding) than other temperate zone races. Italians are light colored, most leather colored, but some strains are golden.
- Apis mellifera carnica, classified by Pollmann, 1879 - Slovenia - better known as the Carniolan honeybee - popular with beekeepers due to its extreme gentleness. The Carniolan tends to be quite dark in color, and the colonies are known to shrink to small populations over winter, and build very quickly in spring. It is a mountain bee in its native range, and is a good bee for cold climates. It does not do well in areas with long, hot summers.
- Apis mellifera caucasica, classified by Pollmann, 1889 - Caucasus Mountains - This sub-species is regarded as being very gentle and fairly industrious. Some strains are excessive propolizers. It is a large honeybee of medium, sometimes grayish color.
- Apis mellifera mellifera, classified by Linnaeus, 1758 - the dark bee of northern Europe also called the German Honeybee - domesticated in modern times, and taken to North America in colonial times. These small, dark-colored bees, sometimes called the German black bee, have the reputation of stinging people (and other creatures) for no good reason at all; this, however, applies to the hybrid A. m. mellifera x A. m. ligustica populations found in North America and Western Europe, not to the near-extinct "pure" A. m. mellifera.
- Apis mellifera iberiensis, classified by Engel, 1999 - the bee from the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal)
- Apis mellifera cecropia, classified by Kiesenwetter, 1860 - Southern Greece
- Apis mellifera cypria, classified by Pollmann, 1879 - The island of Cyprus - This sub-species has the reputation of being very fierce compared to the neighboring Italian sub-species, from which it is isolated by the Mediterranean Sea
- Apis mellifera sicula, classified by Montagno, 1911 - from the Trapani province and the island of Ustica of western Sicily
Subspecies originating in Africa
Several researchers and beekeepers describe a general trait of the African subspecies which is absconding, where the Africanized honeybee colonies abscond the hive in times when food-stores are low, unlike the European colonies which tend to die in the hive.
- ''Apis mellifera scutellata, classified by Lepeletier, 1836 - (African honeybee) Central and West Africa.
- Apis mellifera capensis, classified by Eschscholtz, 1822 - the Cape bee from South Africa
- Apis mellifera monticola, classified by Smith, 1961 - High altitude mountains at elevation between 1,500 and 3,100 metres of East Africa Mt. Elgon, Mt. Kilimanjaro, Mt.Kenya, Mt.Meru
- Apis mellifera sahariensis, classified by Baldensperger, 1932 - from the Moroccan desert oases of Northwest Africa. This sub-species faces few predators other than humans and is therefore very gentle. Moreover, because of the low density of nectar-producing vegetation around the oases it colonizes, it forages up to five miles, much farther than sub-species from less arid regions. Other authorities say that while colonies of this species are not much inclined to sting when their hives are opened for inspection, they are, nevertheless, highly nervous.
- Apis mellifera intermissa, classified by von Buttel-Reepen, 1906; Maa, 1953 - Northern part of Africa in the general area of Morocco, Libya and Tunisia. These bees are totally black. They are extremely fierce but do not attack without provocation. They are industrious and hardy, but have many negative qualities that argue against their being favored in the honey or pollination industry.
- Apis mellifera major, classified by Ruttner, 1978 - from the Rif mountains of Northwest Morocco - This bee may be a brown variety of the Apis mellifera intermissa but there are also anatomic differences.
- Apis mellifera adansonii, classified by Latreille, 1804 - originates Nigeria, Burkina Faso now hybrids also in South America, Central America and the southern USA. In an effort to address concerns by Brazilian beekeepers and to increase honey production in Brazil, Warwick Kerr, a Brazilian geneticist, was asked by Brazilian Federal and State authorities in 1956 to import about 100 pure African queens (Apis mellifera adansonii) to Piracicaba-Sao Paulo State in the south of Brazil. In a mishap some queens escaped. The African queens eventually mated with local drones and produced what are now known as Africanized honey bees on the American continent. The intense struggle for survival of honeybees in sub-Saharan Africa is given as the reason that this sub-species is proactive in defending the hive , and also more likely to abandon an existing hive and swarm to a more secure location. They direct more of their energies to defensive behaviors and less of their energies to honey storage. African honeybees are leather colored, difficult to distinguish by eye from darker strains of Italian bees. (Behavioral Studies of Learning in the Africanized Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.); Brain Behav Evol 2002;59:68�86) [link]
- Apis mellifera unicolor, classified by Latreille, 1804 - Madagascar
- Apis mellifera lamarckii, classified by Cockerell, 1906 - (Lamarck's honeybee) of the Nile valley of Egypt and Sudan. This mitotype can also be identified in honeybees from California. [link]
- Apis mellifera litorea, classifed by Smith, 1961 - Low elevations of east Africa
- Apis mellifera nubica, (Nubian honeybee) of Sudan
Subspecies originating in the Middle East and Asia
- Apis mellifera macedonia, classified by Ruttner, 1988 - Northern Greece
- Apis mellifera ruttneri, classified by Sheppard, Arias, Grech & Meixner, 1997
- Apis mellifera meda, classified by Skorikov, 1829 - Iraq
- Apis mellifera adamii, classified by Ruttner, 1977 - Crete
- Apis mellifera anatolica, classified by Maa, 1953 - This race is typified by colonies in the central region of Anatolia in Turkey and Iraq (Range extends as far West as Armenia). It has many good characteristics but is rather unpleasant to deal with in and around the hive.
- Apis mellifera pomonella, classified by Sheppard & Meixner, 2003 - Endemic honey bees of the Tien Shan Mountains in Central Asia. This sub-species of Apis mellifera has a range that is the farthest East.
Miscellany
Bee stings have also been reputed to help alleviate the associated symptoms of Multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and other autoimmune diseases. This is an area of ongoing research. Bees are sometimes crushed and mixed with water to form part of a homeopathy treatment.Honey is so sweet that bacteria cannot grow on it, and dry enough that it does not support yeasts. Anaerobic bacteria may be present and survive in spore form in honey, however, as well as anywhere else in common environments. Honey (or any other sweetener) which is diluted by the non-acidic digestive fluids of infants, can support the transition of botulism bacteria from the spore form to the actively growing form which produces a toxin. When infants are weaned to solid foods, their digestive system becomes acidic enough to prevent such growth and poisoning. No sweeteners should be given to infants prior to weaning.
Bees are capable of perceiving the polarization of light. They use this information to orient their communicative dances.
Sources
- A. I. Root's The ABC and XYZ of Beekeeping
- [Molecular confirmation of a fourth lineage in honeybees from the Near East] Apidologie 31 (2000) 167-180, accessed Oct 2005
See also
| Honeybee types and characteristics ([edit]) | |||
| Queen bees | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Queen bee | Virgin queen | Piping queen | Supersedure | |||
| Worker and drone bees | |||
| Worker bee | Laying worker bee – Drone (bee) | |||
| Lifecycle | |||
| Beehive | Honeybee life cycle | Brood | Bee learning and communication | Swarming (honeybee) | |||
| Species and cultivation | |||
| Apiary | Beekeeping | Beeswax | Honey | Langstroth hive | Top-bar hive Africanized bee | Buckfast hybrid bee | Carniolan honeybee | Italian bee |Western honeybee | |||
| Lists | |||
| List of honeybee articles | List of honeybee races | |||
| Diseases of the honeybee | |||
External links
- [Apiary Honigh�uschen at the Drachenfels]
- [Flight of Honey Bee finally understood]
- [Honey Bee Pheromones]
- [Kutik's Honey Farm] Raising honeybee queens
- [Honey Bee Apis mellifera diagnostic pictures, descriptions, natural history]
- [British BIBBA]; accessed Jan 2005
- [Brother Adams On-line book]; accessed September 2005
- [Origin of honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) from the Yucatan peninsula inferred from mitochondrial DNA analysis; Molecular Ecology (2001)10, 1347�1355]; accessed Jan 2005
- [Apis mellifera pomonella, a new honey bee subspecies from Central Asia; Apidologie 34 (2003) 367-375; Walter S. Sheppard and Marina D. Meixner]; accessed 2005
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