The Incredible Honey Bees and Why do Bees Sting Story

by Mary Landau, Photos by Tom Mills

Honeybees: are amazing insects! They have many superpowers of which most people have no knowledge. When one looks at a hive, they have little clue of what they are seeing. Did you know that they are a true community, one that must have all three types of bees to survive?

Let's start with the queen. The queen is the largest bee in the hive. She is the only one that lays eggs that will become worker bees or drones. She lays one- to two-thousand eggs per day and can lay fertile eggs in the regular sized comb, and unfertilized eggs in the slightly larger comb. Drones are the product of the unfertilized eggs (which means that drones have no father). Picking this fact apart will show that the queen determines the gender of the egg by measuring the size of the comb that the workers have built. So, she is a queen in name only, as she doesn't control the builders. The workers control how many drones are raised at a given time. The queen is the longest living of the three types of bees in the hive. This is because she eats only royal jelly that is produced in nurse bees' heads.  The queen will be attended to by many nurse bees as she lays her eggs. They must make sure that she always has enough to eat, and that all her needs are taken care of. There can be only one queen per hive.

The drones are the second-largest bees in the hive. They have very large eyes and are slightly plumper than their sisters. Because they have a shorter tongue, they are unable to feed themselves. Their sisters must feed them. The drones only have one job, and that is to mate with a queen from another hive. This is why they have such large eyes (all the better to see the queen with, my dear). Because drones have no stingers, they are never able to guard the hive. I think that they might go around socializing with the girls and spreading goodwill in the hive. I got this idea from one of the speakers that we had at our bee club meeting. There are lots of things we still don't know about bees.  There can be several hundred drones per hive.

The last of the three caste members is the worker bee. She really lives up to her name. She starts to work as soon as she emerges from her cell. Her first job is to clean the cell that she just came out of. She is fed at first by her sisters, and then learns how to clean and properly store the resources of the hive. After three days she becomes a nurse bee. This is when she starts to develop royal jelly in her head. She then feeds the queen, and the newly hatched larvae, royal jelly. All larvae are fed royal jelly for the first three days. When you think about how often larvae are fed per day you will understand why nurse bees are so important. The larvae are fed at least 1000 times per day. Wow, no wonder they grow so fast! After three days of royal jelly, the larva's diet changes, unless the workers are producing queens. A queen larva stays on that diet for the remainder of her life, which may be up to 4 years. The other larvae will change to a diet of bee bread (a combination of honey and pollen). Yes, they continue to be fed over 1000 times per day.

The worker bee is the one that has most of the superpowers. Making royal jelly is the first. After a few days to one week the worker bee starts to produce wax from her wax glands, which are on the lower part of her abdomen. This will last for about one week. During this time, the worker bee makes new comb and repairs comb that is not correctly shaped. She also caps the pupa cells and the honey cells that are ready. When the wax flow diminishes, she will become a storekeeper bee. She now collects the nectar and pollen brought in by the field bees and takes them to the appropriate cells. She will also fan the nectar that is changing into honey. Fanning helps to dehydrate the nectar, which comes in at about 80% water, reducing it to 17.5% water. This must be done, or else all the honey will spoil. "Almost" honey will ferment; "ripe" honey will last forever.

All this time our worker bee has been a house bee. It has been about 21 days since she emerged. She now will transition for several days. Maybe she will guard the hive or take out what needs to be removed from the hive. She will start her life as a field bee very soon!

Now it is time to learn to fly. She will spend about three days learning to fly and orienting herself to her hive. She takes longer and longer test flights to ensure she can find her hive again. She uses her three simple eyes on the top of her head to orient herself to the sun and to the hive. If the days are warm enough (at least 65° Fahrenheit) and there is no rain, she will be able to do her next job. She must be back to her hive before sunset, or she will most likely get lost. She spends the day gathering pollen and/or nectar for her family. If she is gathering pollen, she will only go to one type of flower. She visits between one and two hundred flowers per flight and takes up to 10 flights per day. When you see working bees, these field bees are usually the ones that you see. She will do her collecting for about 21 days. At night, the field bees come home to sleep. They are the only bees that sleep in the hive.

Bees truly are wonderful creatures. They work so hard all the time! Yet for all the work that they do, each worker bee makes the equivalent of eight drops or 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. I'm so glad that they do make honey, as I have it every morning in my coffee. Just remember that the most important thing that bees do is to pollinate flowers. Without them we would have much less food to eat! Honeybees might be from Europe, but they are the primary pollinators for the plants from Europe. Without honeybees there would be no almonds, no stone fruit such as plums and peaches, no seed fruit such as apples and pears, etc.

Native bees are super important, as are honeybees. If we want to help them. we need to plant native plants. Remember that native bees are experts at pollinating native plants. Without those plants the native bees will disappear. In his first book, The Mountains of California, the famous naturalist John Muir wrote about both types of bees! One chapter, "The Bee Pastures," addresses the fact that native and European bees did live in harmony here in the San Gabriel Valley. This was because of the great abundance of flowers everywhere he looked. He also wrote about meeting the founder and first president of the bee club to which I belong. That would be The Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, established in August of 1873. (Honeybees were first imported to California a few years into the Gold Rush, and into Los Angeles County in 1854.) They were well established by the time Muir met John Gordon in Azusa. Our bee club is the first and oldest continuously meeting club of beekeepers in the state!

Our job, as I see it, is to make sure that there is always an abundance of flowers for all bees, both native and European. We especially need our native plants to be planted more often, which will benefit not only native and European bees and save water, but it will enable the life in our beautiful land to thrive. Enjoy!

Why Do Bees Sting?

Why do bees sting? That is the question I have heard often from children. It usually comes after a short talk with them when they run up to me at school and say, "There is a bee over there. We need to kill it! The answer is of course, they need to protect their hive!

I don't know anyone that likes the feeling of a bee sting, but I do know of several people who give themselves bee stings, yes, on purpose! This is not something that they do lightly, and it is never to be done by those who are allergic to bee venom! Using honeybee products for health is called Apitherapy. One man that I talked to said that he had knee pains often. He told me that he knows how to take care of the pain quickly. One time he was at a Theme Park, with his family, and his knee was giving him problems. He told me that all he did was walk over to a flowering bush, pick up a honeybee and sting himself with it. Then he said that he felt much better.

Many beekeepers have told me that they don't have arthritis. Beekeepers get stung several times a year while working with their bees. One benefit is that they don't seem to get arthritis in their hands. I should have taken up beekeeping years ago. I will see if the arthritis in my hands gets any better with time as I work with my bees.

Not all honeybees have stingers. Drones, the boys in the hive, don't have stingers! Whenever someone asks me how to tell if a bee is a drone, I simply say, "I look into his eyes!" Drones have very large eyes. Once my class found a drone on the playground. I looked at it, picked it up and examined it. The kids were worried that I would be stung. "That's not possible." I said," Boy bees don't have stingers! It is then that one of the boys remembered I had taught them that. I had also taught them that drones must be fed by their sisters. "Do you think that he might be hungry?" I asked. We took the bee into the room and fed it some honey that we had. Yes, he was hungry! Another child wanted to know if lizards ate bees. We had a pet lizard, and yes, the lizard ate it. Instant food chain lesson!