Bees, Swarms and Honey
There are many species of bee in the UK. Some live solitary lives, but others live in colonies. These are the so-called social bees. Honey bees are unique because their colonies continue all the year round, and that’s what makes them special. The colonies of most social bees, for example bumble bee, only last one season. In these cases the queen bee hibernates over winter and starts a new colony in the spring. This builds up, more queens are raised, and the colony dies out completely in the autumn.
Whilst a honey bee colony can last for years, individual bees have a much shorter life span. A worker bee may live for only 6 weeks in the summer.
Because a honey bee colony doesn’t die out, it has to build up large stocks of honey to survive the winter when there are no flowers around. A good colony will store more honey than it needs, and the beekeeper can then take the excess. However, the value of honey bees to the environment is far greater than their commercial value as honey producers.
To produce ½ kg (1 lb) of honey, bees have to visit over 10,000 flowers and travel 75,000 km. An average colony may collect around 150kg a year, but only 15-20kg of this will be ‘excess’ which the beekeeper can take.
Individual bees go through the four stages of insect development – egg, larva, pupa and adult. There are three types of adult bee in a honey bee colony. Most of the adults are workers, infertile females who feed the larvae, keep the hive clean and go out to forage for food. There is a single queen. She is the only fertile female and lays all the eggs. Finally in the summer there will be a few hundred male bees or drones. Their job is to mate with new queens.
A colony may have 50,000 bees by July, but that number will have dwindled to about 10,000 by the end of winter.
There is a wealth of information about bees on the Internet. Try:
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