Adventist Adventurer Awards and Answers/Honey Bee

Honey Bee
Helping Hand

Find in the Bible several verses that speak about bees.

Judges 14:8 (NIV)
Some time later, when he went back to marry her, he turned aside to look at the lion’s carcass, and in it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey.

Psalm 118:12 (NIV)
They swarmed around me like bees,but they were consumed as quickly as burning thorns; in the name of the Lord I cut them down.

Draw the honey bee and tell how it is different from other bees and other insects. Color your picture.

Go to Enchanted Learning to print a Honey Bee

Honeybees are social insects that live in hives. Like all insects, bees have six legs, a three-part body, a pair of antennae, compound eyes, jointed legs, and a hard exoskeleton. The three body parts are the head, thorax, and abdomen (the tail end).

Bees can fly about 15 mph (24 kph). They eat nectar (a sweet liquid made by flowers) which they turn into honey. In the process of going from flower to flower to collect nectar, pollen from many plants gets stuck on the bee's pollen baskets (hairs on the hind legs). Pollen is also rubbed off of flowers. This pollinates many flowers (fertilizing them and producing seeds).

All the members of the hive are related to each other. There are three types of honey bees:

the queen (who lays eggs)

workers - females who gather food, make honey, build the six-sided honeycomb, tend eggs, and guard the hive

drones - males who mate with the queen.

Bees undergo complete metamorphosis. The queen lays an egg in a cell in the wax comb (all the immature bees are called the brood). The egg hatches into a worm-like larva, which eventually pupates into an adult bee.

Within a colony, name the 3 types of bees and what are their responsibilities.

Worker

Worker bees are the smallest of the species, about half the weight of the queen and the drones

It takes a worker bee 21 days to develop from an egg to an adult.

The duties of the worker bees are many and varied. They keep the hive clean, take care of the brood (eggs and larvae) such as feeding them royal jelly, attend the queen, maintain the temperature of the hive by fanning their wings, secret wax and build combs, guard the hive, and perform the all-important job of collecting nectar and pollen.

During late spring, summer and fall, a worker bee will live only about 6 weeks. During winter, they live 4–5 months, taking care of the queen and keeping her warm.

Queen

The beehive is made up of the queen (usually only one per hive), drones (from 2 – 300 individuals), and workers bees(between 10,000 – 100,000, depending on the season). The queen is the largest bee in the hive. It takes the queen bee 16 days to develop from an egg to a queen. She produces special glandular secretions called “queen substance“, which is a pheromone used to hold the colony together and stimulates the workers to maintain the hive. Queens mate one time in their life with 6-8 drones over a 2-7 day period. She must be at least 20 meters in the air to mate. She lays her own weight in eggs every day in summer, from 1,500 2,400 eggs per day. In her lifetime, she can lay over 600,000 eggs. Queen bees can live more up to six years, but her usual lifespan in a hive is two years. The queen is fed by the worker bees, and eats up to 80 times her weight daily.

Drones Drones are the males of the species. They are recognizable by their very large eyes. It takes a drone bee 24 days to develop from an egg to an adult. Their only purpose in life, and only job in the hive, is to mate with the queen. Drones have no sting. They die when they mate, or if they have not mated by the beginning of winter, the workers kick them out of the hive where they are left to die.

Explain and draw the life cycle of the honeybee.

Honey Bee - Part 1 from Youtube

Honey Bee Part 2 from Youtube

Honey bees develop in four distinct life cycle phases: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. The total development time varies a bit among the three castes of bees, but the basic miraculous process is the same: 24 days for drones, 21 days for worker bees, and 16 days for queens.

https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/honey-bee-life-cycle.html

What is the purpose of the scout bee’s dance?

All animals and insects use some form of communication. For honeybees, it is often referred to as a dance. Scout honeybees go out in search of good nectar and pollen sources. When they come back, they do a dance that tells the other bees not only how far the nectar is, but also the direction in which to travel using the sun as a reference point. If the nectar is in the direction of the sun, the dance will be performed straight up the walls of the hive: if the map were a clock, they would dance toward 12:00. If the nectar is 30 degrees to the right of the sun, the dance will be performed at about 2:00. If the nectar is distant from the hive, the scout bee does a figure-eight dance (Waggle Dance). It’s dark in the hive, so the other bees hold on to that scout bee to feel the directions.