How Honey Bees Do Their Job

Worker bee Beekeeping Honey bee

How honey bees do their job

What are honeybees?
Bees are flying insects, and close relatives of the wasps and ants. They are found on every continent on earth, except for Antarctica because it is so cold there. Bees of all varieties live on nectar and pollen. Without bees, pollination would be difficult and time consuming. One-third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination. Bees have a long, straw-like tongue called a probiscus that allows them to drink the nectar from deep within blossoms. Worker bees are the most familiar-looking member of the honeybee hive, as they make up 99% of each colony’s personality. Worker bees are females, they do most of the work around the hive. From birth to 45 days later, the worker bee is given different tasks to do during different stages of her life. Worker bees are responsible for everything from feeding the larvae (the baby bees) to even tending to the queen, and also cleaning the hive, to collecting the food, they also guard the colony, to building the honeycomb. The stinger of the worker bee is barbed, when she is forced to defend the hive her stinger will be stuck in the skin of the person she has stung. Honey is produced in one of the busiest most efficient factories in the world- a beehive. Honey bees are the most outgoing insects in the world. A colony contains one queen, 500 to 1,000 and about 30.000 to 60.000 workers.

The female honeybee will be unable to pull her stinger out, and she dies when she inevitably tears herself away from the stuck stinger, leaving it behind with venom sack still pumping venom into her victim.

Male bees are called drones. Their job is to mate with the queens from other hives, if they don’t mate they will die immediately afterwards. If they do mate they will live for 90 days. That is actually longer then the worker bee. These male bees are kept on standby during the summer for mating with a virgin queen. Because the drone has a barbed sex organ, mating is...
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