AMAZING BEE FACTS ( Making Honey, The making of a Queen)

Honey bees are assigned jobs based on their age:

for instances for the worker bee:

• 1-2 days old  : spend their time cleaning cells,starting with the one they were born in, and keeping the board warm.
• 3-5 days old : they feed older larvae
• 6-11 days old : they feed the youngest larvae
• 12-17 days old : they produce was, build combs, carry food, and perform undertaker duties
• 18-21 days old :  the perform guard duty, protecting the hive entrance
• 22 days on until their death at around 40-45 days : they fly from the hive collecting pollen, nectar water, pollinating plants etc. 

                                       

Making Honey:

Honey bees make honey by taking nectar from flowers and mixing it with enzymes from glands in their mouths. Then is then stored in hexagonal wax honeycombs until the water content has been reduced to around 17%. Once this happens, worker bees cap the combs with wax seal until bees need it for food , for instance in winter  time.

The making of a Queen:

When a colony get crowed , the bees will decide to make a new queen bee. The process to do this is follow:

Step 1 : Bees construct up to 20 wax queen cells.

Step 2 : The current queen lays fertilized eggs in each queen cell.

Step 3 : The young nurse bees feed the young queen larvae with a special rich creamy food collect royal jelly  and extend the cell downwards until it is about 25 mm in length.

Step 4 : Nine days after laying eggs , the first queen cell is sealed with a layer of wax.

Step 5 : A large swarm , called the prime swarm , of the bees leaves the hive led by the older bees . The old queen get starved so she is thinner and able to fly . The older bees can then convince the old queen  to join the swarm and they go off scouting for a new place to create a colony. Amazingly , this swarm will take a lot of breaks along the way , sending out the scouts to go search. Scouts report back and from this information, they choose the best spot to go next.

Step 6 : Eight days later the first virgin queen leaves her cell . Now , either she takes an additional small                      swarm and leaves this hive to start a new one  or she locates and kills her sister potential queens by                stinging them through the wax well of their cells.

Step 7 : The young queen flies around and orients herself to her new surroundings .

Step 8 : The queen will take several mating flights and will mate up to 20 male bees called drones will die                    after mating.

Step 9 :  Three days later the mated queen will begin to lay fertilized eggs at a rate of about 2000 per day. Fertilized eggs become female bees. unfertilized eggs get fertilized by male drones and become a  new drones. At any given time there is 1 queen bee , up to 40,000 or so female worker bees and  few hundred male drones.

Step 10 : This queen with stay the colony for at least 8 years until a large enough swarm is available to go start a new colony somewhere else.Though the worker bees only live 40 or so days and drones bees die in mating or are evicted from the hive in the autumn to conserve food as they do no actual  work , the queen bee can live up to 5 years.