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The many faces of the colony and communication of a social creature Overview: To really understand what happens in a honeybee colony, we must first cover the duties of the players. The colony falls in the family of Social Creatures, meaning they have no self value and work as a whole, much like brain cells and herds of jellyfish do. This instinctual action of totality within the hive is essential to its survival. After a brief look at the individuality duties of the three castes, we will cover how communication plays it's part in the hive. The Worker Bee
As the worker bee ages, her duties move toward the hive's entrance. She will continue to collect nectar from returning field bees, do guard duties and fan the hive for ventilation. Finally around her third week of life, she will take short orientation flights to strengthen her wings and familiarize herself with the location of her home. She will be fully aware of her homes location and fly miles each day collecting pollen and nectar from plants, trees and flowers. She will literally touchdown thousands of times each day pollinating the fruits and vegetables that we eat. In her foraging life, a mere 2 weeks, she will fly over 400 miles. Literally wearing out her wings to the point where flying is no longer possible. At this point, only 5 weeks into her short life, the worker bee will walk away from the hive, thus no longer being a burden to the colony. She dies shortly after.
The Queen
The queen is an amazing egg laying machine. She is selected to be a queen when she is either an egg or a very young Larva. Worker bees realize the need for a new queen and they choose several eggs or larva and begin preparing them to be queens. The reason may vary, but generally the colony either has a failing queen, or the colony plans to swarm, or the existing queen was somehow killed. No matter the reason, raising a new queen is a fight against time if the colony is queenless and many colonies have failed in a last attempt at queen replacement. Visually the queen is very similar to the worker. Her body is noticeably paler though, with less pronounced stripes on the abdomen. Also, she has a bald spot just behind her head on the area called the thorax, where the 6 legs and 4 wings attach. Many beekeepers mark the queen with a colored dot so that she will stand out in the hive. The dot is color coded to show the year the queen was first used. The queen is fed a glandular substance from worker bees called Royal Jelly throughout her larva stage. The she is sealed up by the workers and 16 days later she emerges a fully developed queen, ready to mate within days. Somewhere around her third day of life, she leaves the colony to mate with as many as 10 or 12 drones. The mating takes place " in flight " and the drones, who leave their sex organs inside of the queen, die shortly afterwards. The newly mated queen returns home and begins laying eggs at a rate of 1500 to 2500 eggs a day for a period of up to 5 years. As the queen moves throughout the hive, She encircled by a group of workers known as the Royal Court. The Royal Court actually comprises nearly every bee in the colony, each taking turns surrounding and assisting her, feeding the queen, touching her and spreading her scent throughout the hive by rubbing their antennas over the queen. At any time a dozen or so workers will aid the queen, but eventually all the workers make their way to touch and assist the queen in her endless duties as the "egg layer" of the hive.
The typical colony has only a few hundred Drones. They are not productive to the colonies survival and are only kept for emergency mating purposes. They are stingless and unclean, fowling the colony with their waste. Workers constantly remove the waste from the hive and keep it extremely sterile. Drones are fat and hairy and nearly twice the size of the workers. During the Fall, the most bizarre hive activity occurs. Worker bees, which are half the size and weight of the Drones, pick up the larger Drones, carry them to the entrance and toss them to the ground. When the Drones try to return, the guard bees prevent them from re-entering. Eventually they give up and go looking for other colonies and other queens to mate with. The life expectancy of the Drone is one year.
The worker lives a short life of only 5 weeks during the Summer, but lives several months during the Winter when the queen stops producing eggs. The Wintered workers raise the larva and live long enough for this new season's freshly hatched workers to take over the many tasks. Then these Wintered workers simply die off and completing a cycle that has gone on for millions of years. Not shown in this drawing is the spined rear leg where pollen is packed for the flight back to the colony. Look at the top of this page for a good view of the pollen spine. Also, notice that the heart runs across the top, and the full length of the workers abdomen. It is shown in read here in red. Honeybees have 5 eyes. There are three "simple eyes" on top of the bee's forehead, which basically determine where "UP" is, in relationship to everything else. These "simple eyes" really don't see anything. The other two eyes can easily be seen when looking at the bees. They are faceted and actually see things in 9000 small mosaic pieces. Their brains put the information together to form the simple pictures. A good Beekeeper uses the bee's mosaic vision to the Beekeeper's advantage. We learn early on that slow movements around the bees are hardly notices. It's swift and jerky swinging of the arms that will get you stung. The honeybee's antenna is
used for smelling, much like the hairs in our noses. They have four wings attached to the same
section of the body as the 6 legs - the Thorax. Observing Bee-havior The most important part of beekeeping is watching you bees. You can avert lots of trouble by closely observing the activity both inside and outside of the hive. Social creatures behave in predetermined ways that are instinctual, so knowing a particular behavior should also trigger a given response or series of responses. All the activity of your colonies should be logged and carefully described for future reference by you. Anyone reading the detailed log entries of my Beemaster's Digital Logbook will see that it helps to talk-out the observations. Coming to credible conclusions to particular behavior can often mean the difference between success and failure in Wintering your bees. But conclusions are like belly buttons, we all have one but they are all a little different. Two experienced beekeepers can watch the same behaviors and draw two different conclusions. One will be right and the other will be wrong. Who is right? The person who better interpreted what they had seen. The success is in the observation and the observation came with experience. But without talking out the observations to yourself or even better sharing it with other beekeepers, you will never draw the right conclusion and your intervention with the hive may not be what was needed and the hive could suffer from it. I'll cover all the details of observation in its own section
soon. But I need you to understand that logging your activity and the
behavior of the bees is crucial to the successful raising and
over-Wintering of the colonies. More than 40% of colonies fail each
Winter across the United
States, mostly due to reasons beyond our control. That's 4 out of 10
colonies
that we can't save, the remaining 60% is within our control and their
success
rate is a barometer to our interactiveness with the colonies. Settling
for
60% survival is not acceptable either, we should always try to Winter
100%
of our colonies no matter what statistics claim. A Sad Commentary Nature, evolution and God must be one in the same. To create such a balanced system of animal and insect, plant and air, sun and stars. The oldest recorded Honeybee found is said to have been encased in petrified amber and nearly unchanged from how it look 45 million years ago. This means that the honeybee could go back as far as 200 million years. And our happy little flying pollination machine is one of the few remaining creatures that actually lived during the time of the dinosaurs. I received an email a while ago. The sender told me that honeybees haven't evolved because God made them perfect. I think that is an excellent thought for the day. They truly are very unique in their abilities. Many insects and birds pollinate crops, various plants, trees and flowers. But the honeybee is a wonder to observe and luckily us humans can interact almost seamlessly into their world. Without the Honeybee, we too would die off eventually from critically low food resources of all kinds. Without crop pollination, the animals we eat, the fruit and vegetables we consume and the trees we get our air from would all disappear. Honeybee extinction could very well seal our own fate. It wouldn't take many generations for us to disappear either. Easily it could happen in our life time if honeybees are lost to their many parasites, diseases and element conditions. There is a REAL THREAT to the preservation of this important creature and mans intervention is crucial to their survival. Maybe someday, honeybees will have the success that they have had for millions of years. Interestingly, time is an amazing thing. Very likely honeybees may have bee near extinction a thousand times over these many millions of years. Everything in this world is a cycle. The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the Ocean Tide, our Heartbeats, the breath we take are all cycles and EVERYTHING in the Universe has a cycle to it and HUMANS have really not monitored MOST of the cycles of our fantastic planet and the bodies we fill. But every since humans evolved to their place in the chain of command, we have done NOTHING but destroy and later try to repair. Don't put double hulls on an oil tanker, have an oil spill in Alaska in stead. Hind sight has cost us many fascinating species. A list of creatures that will never come within a thousand lifetimes. I can only pray that the Honeybee won't make that list.
Due to Mite infestation of honeybees in the wild, and in beekeeper's fields - nearly all wild honeybees are facing extinction. Except for honeybee farms and the relentless search for a control of these prolific mites, honeybees are doomed to be a protected species, raised and tended to by man. I doubt that we could keep them going another 200 million years. NOTE: I do not cover medical treatment of the hives in my course. I am a hobbyist beekeeper and NOT a scientist or professional bee farmer. Soon, I will have a section devote to the treatment of mites, which will a collection of links to articles at the leading Beekeeping On-Line Magazines. I suggest anyone interested in Beekeeping, no matter what the reason, will find great articles written by the professional beekeepers at Bee Culture Magazine - CHECK OUT their Archives with thousands of articles concerning hundreds of topics. Back to
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The largest population of the
colony is the worker, normally numbering in the hundreds of thousands
in an established colony. Many tasks are performed by workers which are
necessary for the colonies survival. These duties occur relative to the bee's age. The freshly uncapped workers
perform "In-hive" tasks, such as
feeding and capping over larva, storing both nectar and pollen from the
foraging
bees, returning from the fields, general hive cleaning and much more. Note: all these inner hive tasks are performed in
total
darkness. 
The
Drone 
Basic Anatomy of a worker bee.