Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [15]
Not all of the eggs get fertilized. The unfertilized eggs become males or drones, while the fertilized eggs become female worker bees. If a queen never mates or simply never becomes fertile, all her eggs will become drones, and she should be replaced by the beekeeper. A queen bee can live up to five years, but her egg production will begin to drop off after two or three years. For this reason, most beekeepers must eventually replace, or requeen, their hives. Requeening each year ensures that a hive has a young, healthy queen; a strong queen, in turn, means a strong colony that generates maximum honey production.
The queen bee has a stinger, but it is not barbed as a worker’s. She is capable of stinging repeatedly, but reserves her sting for desperate moments of combat with other queens. She does not use it to defend the hive.
When we opened up Billy’s hives, we observed several honeybees hanging around, just flapping their wings. This behavior is known as fanning, and in addition to distributing the queen’s pheromones, it circulates air in order to maintain the proper temperature inside the hive. During brood rearing, the temperature of the brood nest is maintained at 90 to 95°F (32 to 35°C), even if the outside temperature is above 100°F or below zero. Since worker bees metabolize honey to generate the heat needed to warm the hive, honey must be present in the hive at all times.
The presence of a queen is essential to life in the hive. A colony will raise a new queen for a few different reasons: if the existing queen is removed or accidentally killed by beekeeper’s error, or lost on her mating flight, or if an older queen is failing and her production of queen substance and egg laying declines.
Queens that are killed, removed, or lost will be replace by the colony with an emergency queen. The colony will select a young fertilized egg or young worker larva that is not more than three days old. This specially selected egg or larva will be in a worker-sized cell that will be enlarged to a queen cup to accommodate the queen’s larger body.
A failing queen will be replaced by an existing queen in a process called supersedure. The queen will lay a fertilized egg in a queen cup. When the new queen emerges, the old queen will be balled by the workers; a process in which the workers cluster around the queen until she dies from overheating.
Queens reared by supersedure are usually stronger and better cared for than emergency queens since they are not created in a panic and will receive larger quantities of food (royal jelly) during development.
WORKERS
Worker bees are all female, and they comprise the largest group within the hive. They are sexually undeveloped and do not lay eggs under normal hive conditions. However, worker bees do everything else, from feeding and grooming the queen to gathering pollen and nectar and raising brood. They also guard and clean the hive and, most important, make the honey.
A worker bee begins her life as a fertilized egg, which hatches into a larva. As the larva grows it spins a cocoon, and through the process of metamorphosis turns itself into a pupa. Throughout this maturation process, the larva is completely dependent on the care of adult worker bees.
Workers are fully developed and emerge from their cells in twenty days, which is four days less than it takes for a drone to fully develop.
BIRTH CYCLE OF A WORKER BEE
The average worker bee lives approximately four to six weeks in the spring or summer and up to six months during the winter. Each worker specializes in one specific task at each stage of her brief life. The first few days after she emerges from her cell she serves the hive as a house bee and a cell cleaner. She inspects, cleans, and polishes the cells in which the queen lays her eggs. She then begins her duty of feeding older larvae with pollen and nectar brought into the hive by more mature worker bees, as well as with a substance called bee bread, which is a mixture of