Biology

How is beeswax made and what is it good for (08/19/2010)
(...) Another way to conceptualize this is that ten thousand bees can produce about one pound of beeswax in three days. Over eight million pounds of beeswax are produced each year, mostly to be used as an ingredient in industrial lubricants, salves, ointments, furniture polish, ski wax, crayons, adhesives, inks, varnish, insulation, figurines, sculptures, and, of course, candles. When purified, beeswax has a high melting point (140 degrees Fahrenheit), which has an advantage over other waxes for applications in manufacturing. (...)

Types of honey and benefits for human health (08/19/2010)
(...) Crystallized or whipped honey is the most preferred form of honey in many places in Europe, while Americans tend to prefer liquid honey. Is honey good for you? Honey never spoils (if it is stored properly) and contains a surprisingly high level of antioxidants, non-nutritive agents that can slow destructive chemical reactions in food and animal tissues. A recent survey of a variety of monofloral honeys determined that, in general, the darker the honey, the higher the value of its antioxidant content. (...)

Which types of honey can be toxic (08/19/2010)
(...) Flowers in the Sumac genus Rhus make nectar that produces dark red honey (this includes Rhus vernix, poison sumac; and Rhus toxicodendron, poison ivy), but this honey is not harmful to people. Green or unripe honey from a few plants can cause an allergic reaction in some people, and in rare cases, honey results in an allergic reaction due to contamination with pollen allergens. Honey should be considered in any patient with a food allergy that cannot be identified, because if honey is an ingredient, the patient may be having a reaction to pollen allergens in the honey. (...)

Can bee swarming be predicted (08/19/2010)
(...) The scout bees return to where the swarm is waiting, and they "report" on the places they have found, using the waggle dance, and somehow a spot is selected. They prefer certain characteristics for a new cavity, including ample volume, and a dry space high off the ground. A consensus on the choice of a new location is reached by the scouts using a still-tobe- understood process. (...)

How do bees find flowers and their way back to the hive (08/19/2010)
(...) The second type of information, place or location, must also be learned. Bees recognize visual landmarks in the environment, such as tree lines, buildings, landscape features like hills or ridges, and use those images to build a map of their world. In short, bees have the ability to "dead reckon" after a scouting trip. (...)

What makes bees sting and are there killer bees (08/19/2010)
(...) Do killer bees really exist? Africanized honey bees are known popularly as "killer bees," although their venom is no more toxic than that of the common European honey bee. They are dangerous because they can be very aggressive when their colony is disturbed and sometimes thousands at a time will sting one victim, flooding the person or animal with multiple doses of venom that can reach highly toxic levels. Although many people can survive an attack like this, it can be lethal to children or physically vulnerable adults. (...)

How dangerous is it to be stung by a bee (08/19/2010)
(...) The amount of venom injected in such an attack can be so large that it can be lethal. The amount of venom in a single honey bee sting, by comparison, is tiny. What is bee venom? Venom is a complex mixture of chemicals, including a toxic protein called melittin, which bursts blood vessels and damages tissues. (...)

Bee playflight behavior and threats to bees (08/19/2010)
(...) Without playflight behavior, bees cannot learn to navigate. What triggers the behavior is unknown, but we do know that it typically happens between 1 p.m. (...)

Bees also have parasites and insects that molest them (08/19/2010)
(...) Tracheal mites Tracheal mites, Acarapis woodi, are small, spider-like endoparasites that infest the breathing tubes, or trachea, of honey bees, feeding on a bee's hemolymph from inside the bee's body. Dense infestations of tracheal mites can result in colony death during the winter months because, with many mites in the trachea, the bees cannot breathe normally and aren't able to regulate the colony's temperature. Jon Harrison and his colleagues at Arizona State University studied the impact of mite infestation on the breathing of bees. (...)

What viruses affect bee colonies (08/19/2010)
(...) Biologist Adam Stow and his colleagues in Australia washed off the protective coatings from the bodies of a variety of bees that ranged from very social to solitary. They applied a solution made from each species' coating to staph bacterium, Staphlococcus aureus, and found that the antimicrobial coating from the most social bees was 314 times stronger than that from the most solitary bees. Even the most mildly social bees were 10 times better protected than the solitary bees. (...)

Can beekeeping be dangerous for beekeepers (08/19/2010)
(...) Conditions that can destabilize a colony are a shortage of food, the proximity of pesticides or other chemicals, too much or too little water (water stress), disease, and overcrowding. What does a beekeeper's hive look like? In the United States, the standard hive used by beekeepers is called a Langstroth hive, named after the person who discovered the "bee space" - the size of the space that the bees prefer between combs. An important feature of the Langstroth colony is its modularity, which means that the basic features of the colony are exchangeable, replaceable, moveable, and expandable. (...)

How to manage a bee hive and collect the honey (08/19/2010)
(...) How does a beekeeper take honey from a hive? In past centuries, taking honey from wild colonies usually involved subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the area of the hive where the colony was located. The honeycombs were torn out and destroyed along with the eggs and larvae. The honey was strained through a sieve or a basket to remove the broken pieces of comb and any other solids from the liquid honey. (...)

How exactly is a queen bee mating (08/17/2010)
(...) The ejaculation separates the drone from the queen, and he dies shortly after mating. When is a queen mating? Observers report that they can tell when a queen bee is mating nearby because of the large number of dying drones that drop to the ground, sometimes accompanied by a noise like popcorn popping. The drone's severed genitals may act as a temporary vaginal plug, designed to allow time for the drone's sperm to enter the queen's system, but the queen or a subsequent suitor can dislodge the plug, so no drone is guaranteed exclusivity. (...)

What is royal jelly and why do only queen bees eat it (08/17/2010)
(...) When the worker bees sense that the colony's resident queen is failing, they respond by creating some larger-than-usual cells, called queen cups, in the brood comb and encouraging her to lay eggs in them, so they can begin to rear a few new queens. A new queen must quickly supercede or replace the old queen if the colony is to survive. The worker bees produce royal jelly from a specialized gland (the hypopharyngeal gland) in the head, and they deposit a steady supply of it into the especially large cell where the queen larva is developing. (...)

How many bees are there in a hive and how do they build their nest (08/17/2010)
(...) As a part of the preparation for swarming, the bees will have consumed large quantities of nectar or honey, which primes their wax-producing glands. These bits of wax are called wax scales. They are chewed and sculpted into the familiar honeycomb pattern. (...)

How does queen bee control an entire hive (08/17/2010)
(...) It signals to them, in combination with a chemical marker the queen deposits on her eggs and the presence of an adequate number of larvae, that the queen's egg laying and brood development is going well, and it influences the workers to exercise reproductive self-restraint. In the European honey bee colonies that they studied, Madeleine Beekman and Benjamin Oldroyd found that approximately 1 percent of the workers had active ovaries and were able to lay eggs. Somehow their ovaries had become activated despite all the cues to the contrary, but if they actually produced eggs, the eggs would most likely be removed, destroyed, or eaten by other workers because they lacked the queen's mark. (...)

How do bees make propolis and what is it good for (08/17/2010)
(...) New research suggests that bees thrive with increased ventilation, and it seems that propolis may be more important in reinforcing the structure of the hive and making the hive more defensible. Bees have also been known to use propolis and wax to entomb the carcass of an intruder (like a mouse) that has died after breaking into the hive during the winter. Normally, bees carry waste out of the hive, but because a mouse is too large to remove from the hive, they effectively mummify it. (...)

How is flower pollination done by bees (08/17/2010)
(...) Specifically, honey bees' pollination activities are important for almonds, apples, blackberries, blueberries, melons, cherries, peaches, pears, nectarines, cucumbers, cranberries, and soybeans. Honey bees pollinate the bulk of these crops, which are worth more than fifteen billion dollars to the U.S. (...)

Can farmers make bees pollinate their crops (08/17/2010)
(...) Although the transfer of pollen is always unintentional, a honey bee that is deliberately gathering pollen is up to ten times more efficient as a pollinator than one that is primarily gathering nectar, so commercial beekeepers try to manage their hives so that the bees are in this pollen-gathering state when their "money" crops are in bloom. Close to one million honey bee hives are needed in California in the spring when the almond orchards are in bloom. The apple trees in New York require about thirty thousand hives, and the blueberry crop in Maine requires about fifty thousand hives each year. (...)

What is special about bees living in colonies (08/15/2010)
(...) Honey bees are specialized to be efficient pollinators, engaging in behaviors and having physical attributes (pollen baskets on their legs, for example) that are specifically aimed at efficiently gathering nectar and pollen to feed their brood. Given the nickname "pollen pigs" by some afficionados, honey bees are generalists in that they visit an exceptional diversity of plants to acquire food for their family. In the course of their foraging, they incidentally fertilize a wide range of plants, making it possible for the plants to reproduce and bear fruit. (...)

How do honey bees develop and what do they eat (08/15/2010)
(...) Prompted by hormones and pheromones, the larva stops eating and finally expels its feces, which are pushed down to the bottom of the cell. The nurse bees apply a wax cap that closes off the cell, and the larva spins a cocoon around itself using silk from a special gland in its head. Layers of silk may coat the brood cell walls, having accumulated from previous larval generations. (...)

Classification of bees and evidence of their early existence (08/15/2010)
(...) The females typically have a sting on the ovipositor, and a few species have a piercing ovipositor. Hymenoptera undergo complete metamorphosis, and the males usually develop from unfertilized eggs. Many of the species in this order are social and live in colonies that can be quite large. (...)

What do worker bees do in the hive (08/15/2010)
(...) When a worker first emerges from her pupal case, she spends the first day or two letting her wings and exoskeleton harden. Then she begins to work at tasks associated with the interior of the nest, including bringing food to the larvae in their cells and grooming the queen and the other workers. Until she is seven to ten days old, she consumes protein-rich pollen so that the hypopharyngeal glands in her head fully develop. (...)

Can bees be intelligent and do they have hearts (08/15/2010)
(...) Because of their highly social lives and sophisticated behaviors, bees are thought to be among the most intelligent insects. The neural architecture of the honey bee brain is particularly intriguing. The small brain has many highly organized and sculpted regions that are easily distinguishable under a microscope. (...)

Can bees see well and distinguish colors (08/15/2010)
(...) The bee's other three eyes are simple structures, called ocelli, that are located on the top of its head. These are light-detecting organs that do not produce visual images. They are common in some other insects; for example, some butterflies have ocelli on their genitalia. (...)

How do bees hear and feel different tastes (08/15/2010)
(...) A project completed in 2006 that examined the honey bee genome found that bees have only ten receptor genes for the sense of taste, compared to fruit flies with sixty-eight or mosquitoes that have seventy-six. Honey bee larvae spend their entire larval lives completely sequestered in a cell, eating whatever the nurse bees bring to them, and even in solitary species the larvae emerge onto a pile of food that was put in place when their mother laid their egg. So neither type of bee larvae needs to taste or select its food. (...)

Do bees buzz to communicate with each other (08/15/2010)
(...) They communicate about finding food, avoiding or ejecting predators, and about conditions within the hive. There may be a surplus or a shortage of food, overcrowding, a need to start building more comb, or a queen who has stopped laying eggs - each of these situations requires a group response that has to be orchestrated. Nobel prize–winning research by Karl von Frisch revealed that bees do different "dances" in order to tell the other bees where they have located a good nectar source. (...)

What is piping behavior of honey bees (08/15/2010)
(...) Thomas Seeley and Jurgen Tautz described the piping behavior of mature workers as similar to queen piping, with the important distinction that the piping worker pipes other bees directly: the worker usually presses her body or head against the queen or a sister worker, pulls her wings tightly over her abdomen, and arches her abdomen downward. Then she vibrates her wing muscles and short, high-pitched bursts of sound are produced. An important function of this behavior is to cause the recipients to warm their flight muscles in preparation for "liftoff" prior to swarming, but workers may pipe the queen intensely for several days or weeks prior to the departure of the swarm, and the meaning of this behavior is not yet understood. (...)

How do bees sleep and perceive magnetic fields (08/15/2010)
(...) The exhausted bees compensated the following night with longer and deeper sleep, suggesting that, like in mammals, sleep is controlled by regulatory mechanisms. This conclusion is also suggested by the results of an experiment by Thomas Seeley and colleagues at Cornell University. They transplanted two colonies and trained the older bees to forage at particular times, and they found that the foragers shifted their sleep schedules so that they would be awake when resources were available. (...)

How do bees use light and get away from predators (08/15/2010)
(...) In aggressive mimicry, a predator gives off signals that usually promise food or sex to their prey, and then they just sit back and wait for the prey to come to them. For example, the predator may look or smell enough like a female bee so that a male bee will be fooled into approaching. In the Mojave Desert, a cluster of tiny, millimeter-long blister beetle larvae Meloe franciscanus give off a pheromone (a stimulating scent) that fools male solitary bees, Hapropoda pallid, into mistaking the larvae for a female bee ready to mate. (...)