She is the other Female , but the smallest bee in the colony – only about half the size of the drone or the Queen.
The worker Bee is produced from a fertilised egg – unlike her brother the drone who is produced from an unfertilised egg.
The honeyBee egg will hatch in about three days and emerge as a small white larva. At this stage one of the worker Bees who is acting as a nurse will fill the cell in which the larva is resting with a substance called Bee milk. On the eighth day the cell will be capped with wax. The worker Bee will emerge from her cell 21 days later. She is then ready to her duties in the hive. In the summer time a worker Bee will live for just over a month – about 36 days. During the winter she will live for about 6 months.
When the worker Bee emerges from her cell she still has a little more maturing to do – during these few days she will be doing cleaning duties around the hive. After a few days she will take her first flight around the hive.
There are various roles within the colony that the worker Bee will perform – usually they will all progress from one role to the next but are able to perform any job at any time. The roles include nursing & cleaning, as mentioned earlier, also wax production, honey processing and guard duties. These roles are all ‘in-door’ duties and after about 20 days she will become a forager.
When the worker Bee is in this stage of her life her role is to find and collect pollen, nectar, water and propolis. These substances are required by the hive to live. The pollen is used by the Bees as a source of protein and vitamins. It is collected from flowers and carried back to the hive on the Bees hind legs. Nectar is stored in the honey comb, transported back to the hive is a specially designed honey stomach. Nectar, gathered from flowers is primarily sugar and water. Polpolis is a sticky substance gathered from plant buds, again carried to the hive on the Bees legs and is used for maintaining the hive.
A small number of the foragers will become what are known as scouts. The scouts explore the area around the hive for the best flowers from which to gather nectar. When they find a particular flower with a high sugar content they will return to the hive and ‘dance’ for the other Bees. The dance is a way of communicating to the other Bees the best forage available and the direction to go in order to find it.
A worker Bee has a life span of about 36 days. When a colony is at full strength in the peak summer months there may be as many as 50 – 60 thousand adult Bees and approaching 40 thousand Bees developing in the brood frames.
A Worker bee is any female eusocial bee that lacks the full reproductive capacity of the colony’s queen bee; under most circumstances, this is correlated to an increase in certain non-reproductive activities relative to a queen, as well. Worker bees occur in many bee species other than honey bees, but this is by far the most familiar colloquial use of the term.
Honey bee workers keep the hive temperature uniform in the critical brood area (where new bees are raised). Workers gather pollen into the pollen baskets on their back legs, to carry back to the hive where it is used as food for the developing brood. Pollen carried on their bodies may be carried to another flower where a small portion can rub off onto the pistil, resulting in cross pollination. Almost all of civilization’s food supply (maize is a noteworthy exception) depends greatly on crop pollination by honey bees, whether directly eaten or used as forage crops for animals that produce milk and meat. Nectar is sucked up through the proboscis, mixed with enzymes in the stomach, and carried back to the hive, where it is stored in wax cells and evaporated into honey.
Workers must maintain the hive’s brood chamber at 34.4 degrees C to incubate the eggs. If it is too hot, they collect water and deposit it around the hive, then fan air through with their wings causing cooling by evaporation. If it is too cold, they cluster together to generate body heat. The life of all honey bees starts as an egg, which is laid by the queen in the bottom of a wax cell in the brood area of a hive. A worker egg hatches after three days into a larva. Nurse bees feed it royal jelly at first, then pollen and honey for six days. It then becomes an inactive pupa. Honeycombs have hexagonal cells on both sides of a vertical central wall. As shown in the photo, these cells are inclined upward, primarily to retain liquid nectar and honey. During its 14 days as a pupa, sealed in a capped cell, it grows into a worker (female) bee, emerging on the 20th day. In most species of honey bees, workers do everything but lay eggs and mate, though Cape honey bee workers can lay eggs. They build the comb from wax extruded from glands under their abdomen. They clean, defend, and repair the hive. They feed the larva, the queen, and the drones. They gather nectar, pollen, water, and propolis. They ventilate, cool and heat the hive.
When a colony absconds (all bees leave the colony) or divides and so creates a swarm and then establishes a new colony, the bees must regress in their behavior in order to establish the first generation in the new home. The most urgent task will be the creation of new beeswax for comb. Beekeepers take advantage of this by introducing swarms into new or existing colonies where they will draw comb. Comb is much more difficult to come by than honey and requires about six times the energy to create. A newly hived swarm on bar bars (top bar hive) or empty foundation (Langstroth box hive) will often be fed sugar water, which they can then rapidly consume to create wax for new comb (Mature hives cannot be so fed as they will store it in place of nectar, although a wintering hive may have to be fed if insufficient honey was left by the beekeeper.)
A colony of honeybees in early summer consists of a queen, thousands of workers and a few hundred drones living together as a community upon double-sided combs containing brood and stores of honey and pollen. The queen alone lays the eggs from which the other members of the colony develop, the workers from fertilized eggs and the drones from unfertilized eggs laid in slightly larger cells.
The combs are made of wax secreted by the workers. In colonies living ‘wild’ in hollow trees or in cavities in walls the workers construct the combs unaided, but in modern moveable-comb hives the beekeeper provides thin, flat sheets of beeswax, embossed with a regular hexagonal pattern and enclosed by hanging wooden frames, for the bees to use as a foundation upon which to build the rows of cells on either side.
The fertilized eggs laid by the queen in worker cells take three days to hatch. The tiny grubs, or larvae, are fed by nurse bees and grow rapidly to reach their full size five days later. Their cells are then sealed over with porous cappings of wax and the larvae turn into pupae from which the young workers emerge in another 12 -14 days, when they chew their way through the cappings to join the older workers on -the combs. Drones take a few days longer to develop.
By midsummer the colony will have reached its greatest strength, with up to fifty thousand or more bees if all goes well. Thereafter, the population of workers will decline, and by early autumn all the drones will have died, leaving the queen and a reduced number of workers to survive the winter.
Breeding starts again early in the year, (January or February) , slowly at first, but with gradually increasing numbers of young workers emerging to replace the old, over-wintered bees until the peak of egg-laying by the queen is reached about four months later.
The cycle of colony growth and decline might, however, be interrupted by the issue of a swarm, usually sometime in May, June or July. The causes of swarming are not fully understood, though it is known that overcrowding of the hive is one of the predisposing factors. Whatever the cause, the effect is that a large proportion of the workers, together with the queen, pours out of the hive during the heat of a fine day and flies around before settling in a tight cluster on a nearby bush or other convenient support.
If the swarm is not taken by the beekeeper, the bees and the queen will eventually fly off to establish a new colony in a new home, discovered for them by scout bees, usually some distance away from the hive from which they issued. The rest of the bees will remain behind in the hive, with the brood. On the brood combs will be some queen cells large, acorn-shaped cells which hang mouth downwards and contain larvae hatched from normal fertilized eggs but fed on a special diet of ‘royal jelly’ produced by die nurse bees. In these cells queens will develop, one of which, after mating in the air with several drones in succession, will become the new laying queen of the swarm’s ‘parent / original’ colony.
The issue of a swarm brings about a sudden depopulation of the hive, and a consequent decrease in the foraging capacity of the colony, at a time of year when nectar is likely to be readily available. It is, therefore, important for the beekeeper to take steps to avoid his bees to swarm, by using methods to be discussed later, if he in the maximum amount of honey possible.
Beekeeping is a hobby which has an appeal to people in all walks of life. It can be practised with success not only in the country but also in many suburban areas and even successfully in towns & cities. Most beekeepers have only a few colonies and find their care a fascinating and often profitable spare-time occupation, though there is an important minority who keep bees on a scale large enough to give them a livelihood.
Together, whether as professionals or as amateurs, they make a significant contribution to the nation’s food requirements, directly in the form of honey and indirectly through the activities of their bees on those crops that depend upon insect pollinators for a good set of fruit or seed.
Unlike many other forms of livestock, honeybees do not demand regular daily attention from their owners. They forage for themselves whenever the weather is suitable, collecting pollen and nectar from flowering trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants, both wild and cultivated, which offer them a succession of sources of food from early spring until the autumn.
Food not needed for immediate consumption by the bees and their brood (Young Bees) is stored in the combs for use when the weather is unsuitable for foraging. By the end of the summer a healthy colony of bees is capable of storing not only enough food for its own requirements during the winter months but also, over and above this amount, a quantity of honey which the beekeeper can harvest for himself. The yield of honey for the beekeeper will depend upon the kind and quantity of bee forage plants to be found in the locality and the weather conditions prevailing when the various sources of forage come into flower. After a good summer in a district with plenty of nectar-yielding plants it can exceed 100 lb from one colony, but in a bad year the beekeeper may get no honey at all and have to feed his colonies with sugar to enable them to survive until the following spring. Basically, the beekeeper’s task is twofold: Provide his bees with sound hives whose capacity must be enlarged or reduced according to seasonal requirements Discover any other situations within the stocks that may need attention from time to time.
In order to do these things the stocks may need to be examined at intervals from April to September. But from October to March only an occasional visit is normally necessary, to ensure that all is well externally. Pleasurable beekeeping calls for an ability to work among bees at close quarters, handling their combs gently and deliberately. The prospective beekeeper should, therefore, first find out whether he is temperamentally suited to acquire the necessary skill before committing himself to the expense of setting up an apiary. This he can best do by handling bees under the guidance of an experienced beekeeper. Some local authorities offer advice and instruction assistance at this stage, and the beginner should make application to the local beekeepers’ association . By joining such a group he gains the opportunity of meeting experienced local beekeepers and the benefits offered by the society to its members.
Beekeeping is a hobby which has an appeal to people in all walks of life. It can be practised with success not only in the country but also in many suburban areas and even successfully in towns & cities. Most beekeepers have only a few colonies and find their care a fascinating and often profitable spare-time occupation, though there is an important minority who keep bees on a scale large enough to give them a livelihood.
Together, whether as professionals or as amateurs, they make a significant contribution to the nation’s food requirements, directly in the form of honey and indirectly through the activities of their bees on those crops that depend upon insect pollinators for a good set of fruit or seed.
Unlike many other forms of livestock, honeybees do not demand regular daily attention from their owners. They forage for themselves whenever the weather is suitable, collecting pollen and nectar from flowering trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants, both wild and cultivated, which offer them a succession of sources of food from early spring until the autumn.
Food not needed for immediate consumption by the bees and their brood (Young Bees) is stored in the combs for use when the weather is unsuitable for foraging.
By the end of the summer a healthy colony of bees is capable of storing not only enough food for its own requirements during the winter months but also, over and above this amount, a quantity of honey which the beekeeper can harvest for himself. The yield of honey for the beekeeper will depend upon the kind and quantity of bee forage plants to be found in the locality and the weather conditions prevailing when the various sources of forage come into flower. After a good summer in a district with plenty of nectar-yielding plants it can exceed 100 lb from one colony, but in a bad year the beekeeper may get no honey at all and have to feed his colonies with sugar to enable them to survive until the following spring. Basically, the beekeeper’s task is twofold:
Provide his bees with sound hives whose capacity must be enlarged or reduced according to seasonal requirements
Discover any other situations within the stocks that may need attention from time to time.
In order to do these things the stocks may need to be examined at intervals from April to September. But from October to March only an occasional visit is normally necessary, to ensure that all is well externally.
Pleasurable beekeeping calls for an ability to work among bees at close quarters, handling their combs gently and deliberately. The prospective beekeeper should, therefore, first find out whether he is temperamentally suited to acquire the necessary skill before committing himself to the expense of setting up an apiary. This he can best do by handling bees under the guidance of an experienced beekeeper. Some local authorities offer advice and instruction assistance at this stage, and the beginner should make application to the local beekeepers’ association . By joining such a group he gains the opportunity of meeting experienced local beekeepers and the benefits offered by the society to its members.
