About Honey Bees
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Biology
Honey bees live in social units called colonies. A honey bee colony consists of a single queen, who is usually the mother of all other colony members, ten to thirty thousand semi-sterile female workers and, from zero to a few thousand males (drones) depending on the time of year. The immature forms are collectively referred to as brood and include eggs, larvae, and pupae. Adult workers perform all of the behavioral tasks associated with colony living. Worker honey bees perform different tasks as they age, a phenomenon called temporal polyethism. When bees emerge from their cells as adults they normally clean cells, then as they age they feed larvae (nursing behavior), process and store food, secrete wax and construct comb, and guard the entrance. The most pronounced change in behavior occurs when bees are about three weeks old when they begin foraging. At this time, they cease performing most tasks within the nest and usually remain foragers for the rest of their lives. This age progression is not rigid and many factors such as genotype, colony social structure, foraging environment, time of year, and pheromones affect developmental rates and trajectories.
Colonies reproduce through a process of colony budding, commonly referred to as swarming. As colonies grow to swarming size, factors that inhibit queen rearing are released and new queens are reared in the presence of the old queen. Ordinarily, but not necessarily, the old queen leaves the nest with a group of bees to initiate a new nest. A daughter queen inherits the valuable parental nest and any remaining adults. In feral, unmanaged colonies, swarming-related queen rearing begins when colony size is about 12,000 workers and colonies may swarm when there are about 20,000 workers. Adult population size at swarming is highly variable and not the singular determinant for swarming. Other factors such as time of year, adult age distribution, and foraging environment also affect the timing of swarming. In temperate climates swarming usually takes place in the spring. In tropical and sub-tropical climates swarming may take place any time of year.
