Pest of the Month - Honey Bee

• Honey bees are 3/8 to ¾ inches long. Rarely sting unless provoked.
  
• A honey bee stings once and then dies because the stinger, which has a barb at the end of it, gets lodged in the victim and pulls apart her abdomen after she flies away.
• An average hive can consist of 30,000 to 60, 000 bees.
• She is small, hairy, yellowish brown in color. She can sometimes be dark brown or black as well.
• If stung, remove the stinger by scraping and NOT by pulling. Venom sacs continue to pump fluid in until the stinger is removed.
• Native Americans called honey bees “the white man’s fly” because they were brought to North America by Colonists.
• Honey bees have been producing honey from flowering plants for 10 – 12 million years.
• The oldest record of beekeeping is from 6000 BC, from a rock painting in Spain.
• Honey bees appeared in earth during the pre-cretaceous period, about 140 – 170 million years ago.
• They did not exist during the time of the dinosaurs.
• Without the work of honey bees the pollination of many plants, flowers, fruits, etc. would not occur.
• Bees have been affected by disease and parasites, including mites. This has severely decreased their population of the honey bees. These mites were discovered on imported bees in the early 1920’s and importation was stopped. However, in 1984 the mite was again discovered and has been an ongoing task to kill in more than ½ of all honey bee hives. Over 200 million hives have been purposely destroyed to prevent the further spread of the mites. This, however, has yet to be successful.
• A honey bee colony includes the queen (fertile female), workers (infertile females) and drones (males).
• There is only one egg laying queen in a hive. Her life span is 2 – 8 years. She can produce 1000 – 3000 eggs in one day. Queen larvae are reared in special peanut-like cells and fed more pharyngeal gland secretions than the worker larvae. These secretions are called bee milk or royal jelly. The precise mechanism for this caste differentiation is still unclear. She flies to mate to attract a drone by the use of pheromones.
• The bulk of the hive consists of infertile female workers. They forage for nectar and pollen, protect the hive against enemies, and produce wax and honey. Worker bees live for 7 – 8 weeks.
• The drones’ sole purpose in life is to mate with the queen. Once they do this they die. Drones develop by the parthenogenesis from unfertilized eggs that the queen produces by withholding sperm from the eggs laid in large drone cells. They are unneeded members of the hive in late fall and are pushed out of the hive by the queen and workers, and are often found dead at the base of the hive, frozen. New drones are produced in the spring for mating. They tend to buzz ferociously but lack a stinger. They are harmless.
• Unlike popular belief, honey bees do not hibernate in the winter. They last out the cold winter by feeding on stored supplies and sharing their body heat, clustering together in a dense pack.
• The honey bee flies about 15 miles per hour.

www.bee-busters.com