Gentle Honey Bees

It is unfortunate that many people have been taught to be afraid of honey bees. Many times people cannot even recognize the difference among honey bees, wasps, hornets, bumblebees or yellow jackets. They categorize all insects that buzz and sting into the same group. This is wrong.
Ironically, beekeepers are seldom stung. The late Dr. G.H. Cale, a leading authority on honey bees and a honey bee geneticist with Dadant and Sons was responsible for producing a hybrid line of honey bees bred for gentleness and high honey productivity called the “Midnite.” Truthfully, honey bees sting only when they feel they or their home is being threatened. The drone or male honey bee cannot sting at all and the queen bee rarely stings. However, on rare occasions the worker honey bee will sting if she feels the entrance to her hive is threatened. The only consolation for the person who has been stung is that after she stings, her stinger is pulled from her body and she soon dies.

The Honey Bee Colony

The story behind what appears to be the casual movement of honey bees from flower to flower is the discovery of an industrious and tireless society. Honey bees are social insects. They band together and divide labor. The honey bees’ society is made up of three types of individuals with sharply defined duties and functions. The population of the colony numbers from about 7,000 in mid winter to over 70,000 in late summer and consists of one queen, several hundred drones and thousands of workers.

The Worker Bee

The female worker honey bee is the laborer of the colony. Workers gather all the nectar and pollen, feed young larvae, warm and protect eggs, larvae and pupae, supply water, secrete beeswax, build comb and do many other tasks.
The worker starts as a fertilized egg, which hatches into a larva. The larva grows, matures and soon changes into the next form called a pupa. The pupa then matures into an adult worker honey bee. The entire metamorphosis takes only 21 days.
During the summer honey flow, June through August, worker honey bees travel about 55,000 miles to gather enough nectar to produce one pound of honey. Each individual worker will only produce about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey and about 1/80 of a teaspoon of beeswax. However, an entire colony will produce up to 200 pounds of honey annually!

The Queen Bee

Honey bee colony life revolves around the queen honey bee. Without the eggs that she lays the entire colony would die. She begins life as an ordinary female worker larvae, but by feeding on an extremely rich mixture of food, provided by young worker honey bees called royal jelly, becomes a queen. A new queen can be produced at any time, if the young workers choose, by feeding any female larvae less than 48 hours old with royal jelly.
The queen’s function is to lay eggs. Day after day the queen lays thousands of eggs which will develop into more honey bees. She is continually surrounded, protected and fed by young worker honey bees.

The Drone Bee

The drone is the male honey bee. He is larger than the worker and smaller than the queen.
Except for mating, the drone is an expendable member of the colony. Drones do not collect nectar or pollen nor do they make beeswax. In fact they are driven from the colony as winter approaches where they perish from cold and starvation.