Western Honey Bee

Fascinating facts about the Western Honey Bee

• When a colony swarms, the reigning queen departs with roughly two-thirds of the adult workers, leaving the original hive to start a new home elsewhere. This massive exodus occurs after the hive has raised one to two dozen new queens, ensuring the species spreads rapidly.
• A new queen mates in flight with between one and seventeen drones, storing enough sperm to fertilise eggs for the rest of her life. She then remains in the hive, laying all the eggs needed to sustain a colony of tens of thousands.
• Worker honey bees possess a barbed stinger linked to a venom sac, musculature and a ganglion that keep injecting venom even after the sting detaches. The barbs likely evolved to lodge in the elastic skin of vertebrate predators, sometimes allowing the bee to escape and sting again.
• In midsummer a healthy western honey bee hive can swell to between 40,000 and 80,000 individuals, forming a bustling superorganism. Individual colonies can house tens of thousands of bees, and because of this high degree of sociality and permanence they are considered superorganisms. Throughout the growing season the colony produces many workers who gather pollen and nectar, then process the nectar into honey by evaporating it to a low moisture level.
• Queens of the German subspecies A. mellifera have been recorded living up to eight years, far longer than the typical three-to-five-year span. Although most queens live three to five years, reports from the German honey bee subspecies indicate that a queen can live up to eight years. As a queen ages her stored sperm becomes depleted, causing her to lay more unfertilised eggs, which is why beekeepers often replace queens every one or two years.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Western Honey Bee

As the warm sunlight dances across the lush meadow, a Western Honey Bee bursts into life, its iridescent wings beating at a hypnotic pace as it embarks on its eternal quest for nectar and pollen. With each delicate touch, the bee weaves an intricate tapestry of life, collecting and conveying the sweet essence of blooming flowers back to its thriving hive, a testament to the remarkable social harmony that defines this incredible species. In this whirling dervish of motion, the bee's very existence is a masterclass in industrious beauty, a symphony of purpose and cooperation that has captivated human imagination for centuries.

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