The vast majority of the bees in your hive will be female worker bees. There's are your stereotypical honey bee, with a striped abdomen and colour ranging from golden yellow, through dark orange to nearly black. They do all the work in the hive, starting in the nursery looking after the queen and their siblings, then cleaning the hive as a housekeeper or guarding the entrance from pests or other bees, and finally living out the rest of their short lives (around three weeks) as foragers collecting pollen and nectar. The workers can sting, but this stinger is attached internally and will result in their death, so it is usually only to protect the hive or if they are threatened themselves (the classic event of a barefooted toddler stepping on a bee in a clover patch).
A small percentage of the hive will be male drones (5% or less). These lads are only useful for fertilising a virgin queen, and this will generally be a queen from another hive, which means that your hive has a variety of DNA and prevents inbreeding. The drone cells are larger than the workers as the bee is larger when it hatches. And before you male readers start nodding and saying "that's the way it should be", note that in times of stress or low food supply, the workers will expel the drones from the hive to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Drones have no stinger and can be recognised by their larger body, bigger eyes and generally darker colour. It is common for beginner beekeepers to mistake a drone (or drones) as a queen sighting.
Apologies for the poor image quality below (it's a still from a video) but there is her majesty in all her glory. The queen is responsible for laying the eggs that will become your new bees as well as maintaining peace in the hive through the release of an "everything is ok" pheromone. The hive can only have one queen, who lives for several years, and the worker bees will replace her when she becomes too old to continue laying eggs. She only mates once, at the start of her reign, and stores sufficient sperm from this encounter with a cloud of drones to be able to lay fresh eggs from the duration. She is very hard to spot as she is fast moving and runs from the sunlight, so seeing her is a bonus during your hie inspections. However seeing fresh brood cells, larvae or eggs is a sufficient indication that she is alive and active (or at least was in the previous few days). Queens can be bought and introduced to the hive and this can be done when the queen is ageing, or to produce a specific hive characteristic, such as tolerance of plastic or gentler demeanour. Some beekeepers specialise in queen rearing and sales and queens can cost up to $50-100 each. Queens have a longer, tapered abdomen, a smaller head and no stinger. She also moves differently to the worker bees, with a fast and erratic path.
Commentaires