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Honey Bee

Honey Bees : Honey bees play a critical role in agriculture. The most important role honey bees play is actually not honey production, but pollination. There is also a trend to consume more bee-pollinated crops such as fruits and vegetables, making honey bees more and more important in agriculture.

Honey bees also produce honey and beeswax. Besides that bees also produce pollen, propolis, royal jelly, and bee venom that are playing increasing roles in health food and alternative medicine. Bee stings are routinely used for treatment of arthritis, multiple sclerosis and other auto-immune diseases.

Honey bees are studied extensively. Bees have captured mankind's attention since as early as Aristotle. Honey bee life is fascinating; their industriousness (working to their death), selflessness (producing honey for humans and dying to defend their home), and most importantly, their social organization. Honey bees, like other social insects, show "division of labor" whereby different workers specialize on different tasks.

Honey bees are increasingly being used as a model system to study other aspects of biology. Besides their intricate social organization, honey bees are easily maintained, are cost effective in terms of obtaining large numbers of insects, and their genetics can be precisely controlled. Honey bee workers take 21 days to develop from eggs to adults. Since a queen can lay as many as 1,500 eggs a day, large numbers of bees can be obtained easily. Honey bees are probably the only insect that has "artificial insemination" technique successfully invented. This is used extensively both commercially and in research to speed up the selection process and to control the exact genetic makeup of a colony.

Honey Bee Facts :
THE COLONY : Honey bees are social insects, with a marked division of labor between the various types of bees in the colony. A colony of honey bees includes a queen, drones and workers.

THE QUEEN : The queen is the only sexually developed female in the hive. She is the largest bee in the colony. A two-day-old larva is selected by the workers to be reared as the queen. She will emerge from her cell 11 days later to mate in flight with approximately 18 drone (male) bees. During this mating, she receives several million sperm cells, which last her entire life span of nearly two years. The queen starts to lay eggs about ten days after mating. A productive queen can lay 3,000 eggs in a single day.

THE DRONES : Drones are stout male bees which have no stingers. Drones do not collect food or pollen from flowers. Their sole purpose is to mate with the queen. If the colony is short on food, drones are often kicked out of the hive.

THE WORKERS : Workers, the smallest bees in the colony, are sexually undeveloped females. A colony can have 50,000 to 60,000 workers. The life span of a worker bee varies according to the time of year. Her life expectancy is approximately 28 to 35 days. Workers that are reared in September and October, however, can live through the winter. Workers feed the queen and larvae, collect nectar, guard the hive entrance and help to keep the hive cool by fanning their wings. In addition, honey bees produce wax comb. The comb is composed of hexagonal cells which have walls that are only 2/1000 inch thick, but support 25 times their own weight.

Honey Bee benefit to Agriculture :

• AGRICULTURE'S DEPENDENCE : Millions of acres of farming land for fruit, vegetable, oilseed and legume seed crops depend on insect pollination. An estimated 80 percent of crop insect pollination is accomplished by honey bees.

• CROP DEPENDENCE : The almond crop is entirely dependent on honey bee pollination — without honey bees, there would be no almonds.

• Numerous other crops are 90 percent dependent on honey bee pollination. Some of those crops include apples, avocados, blueberries, cherries, cranberries and sunflowers. Other crops such as alfalfa, cucumbers, kiwi fruit, melons and vegetables are also pollinated by honey bees.
  
  

FOOD SUPPLY : About one-third of the total human diet is derived directly or indirectly from insect-pollinated plants.

LIVESTOCK FEED : The production of most beef and dairy products is dependent on insect-pollinated legumes (alfalfa, clover, etc.). Approximately 220,000 colonies of honey bees are used to pollinate alfalfa fields for seed production.

Some Organisation of Beekeeping and Honey :
- Bee Organizations & Associations
- American Association of Professional Apiculturists
- International Bee Research Association
- National Honey Board