What’s That Insect? Honey Bees!

I’ll never forget the first honey bee lecture I ever attended- at the time, I was working for Purina Animal Nutrition, and the presentation focused on their feeding and nutrition. Since then, I’ve always found honey bees to be a fascinating and important topic given their role as pollinators and honey producers. While I can’t possibly cover every interesting fact about honey bees in one article, I did want to introduce you to this fascinating insect this week.
There are several different types of honey bee, with 8 species and 43 subspecies recognized. Did you know there are over 20,000 known species of bees across the globe? The most common honey bee in our area is the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, which was domesticated for honey and crop pollination purposes.
Honey bees are social insects and live in colonies which range in size up to 20,000 strong! These colonies typically have one female queen, a few thousand drones, who are male, and tens of thousands of worker bees, who are female. Each bee has a specific role or job within the colony. The queen bee, who will live 1-2 years, is responsible for producing eggs and producing pheromones that affect hive behavior. If the queen dies or is lost, worker bees will feed developing larvae “royal jelly” which makes them develop into new queens. The only difference between queens and worker bees is the larval diet. Drones are the male bees in a hive, and they exist strictly to mate with queens from other bee colonies. Typically drones will be kicked out of the hive in the fall and winter, so their life span is only about 2 months. The last type of bee is the worker bee, which lives anywhere from 5-6 weeks in the summer to 4-6 months in the winter. Worker bees are responsible for helping the hive survive. They do everything from caring for larvae and young, taking care of the queen, foraging for food, defending the hive, and even removing dead bees from the colony!
Honey bee hives survive from year to year, which means most of their activity is put towards storing enough food to overwinter. During the cold months when temperatures drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit, bees cluster in a tight ball in the hive to stay warm. This ball of bees will stay around 46-48 degrees at the edges but can heat up to 93 degrees in the center where the queen is located in January when she starts laying eggs. Once spring hits and food is available once again, bee populations grow rapidly. This rapid growth can cause overcrowding and the division of hives into new ones- a process called swarming- which happens in April and May, typically. From this point on, the bees are focused on storing honey (a carbohydrate and energy source) and pollen (a protein source) to feed off of the next winter.
Honey bees are popular for the products they can produce for human use- mainly honey and beeswax- and their pollination of crops and flowers. Bees produce honey from the nectar of plants and store it as a food source. Beekeepers can then harvest honey for human consumption- but responsible beekeepers will leave sufficient quantities for the bees to overwinter without trouble. Beeswax is used in a number of products from cosmetics, candles, waterproofing, and more. Finally, bees can be pollinators, however recent research actually suggests honey bees are not very good pollinators due to their preference for specific flowers and plants- typically native pollinators are much more effective than honey bees are.
Finally- I just want to mention that honey bees are pretty docile and are unlikely to cause harm to humans or pets unless you’re allergic. If you’d like to learn more about honeybees, please contact us at uge3181@uga.edu or 706-359-3233.