The living habits and growth process of bees

Bees lay eggs in the hive, and the larvae live in the hive. The larvae that live a social life are fed by worker bees, and the larvae that live a solitary life feed on bee food stored by female bees in the hive. When the bee food is eaten up, the larvae mature and pupate, emerging from the cocoon when they emerge. Domestic bees have several generations per year, while wild bees have one to three generations per year. Take the old, the mature, the young.

Collect honey?

Insects, pupae or adults overwinter. Generally, males appear earlier than females, have shorter lifespans, and do not undertake the tasks of building nests, storing bee food, and raising offspring. Female bees build nests, collect pollen and nectar, and store them in the nest chamber. They live longer than males.

Bees feed on pollen and nectar from plants.

Food habits can be divided into 3 categories:

①Polyphagy, that is, eating pollen and nectar from plants of different families or from flowers of a certain color (regardless of plant species) , Ruyi Bee and Zhong Bee.

② Oligophagous, that is, they feed on the flowers of plants of closely related families and genera, such as alfalfa quasi-bees.

③ Monophagous, that is, eating only from a certain plant or closely related species, such as cornflower ground bees.

The flowers of various types of bees are closely related to the length of their mouthparts: for example, species with shorter mouthparts such as the family Apidae, Diglossidae, etc., visit the Rosaceae and Brassicaceae families. , Umbelliferae, and Ranunculaceae open flowers; while species of the family Apidae, Apiaceae, and Apidae have long mouthparts, so flowers with deep flower tubes such as Fabaceae, Lamiaceae, etc. are selected.

Although the queen bee has been mated, not all the eggs she lays are fertilized. According to the needs of the large group family, it can lay fertilized eggs that will develop into female bees (non-reproductive worker bees) in the future; it can also lay unfertilized eggs that will develop into drone bees in the future. When the large family members of this group multiply too much and cause overcrowding, they will be divided into groups.

The process of swarming is as follows: the worker bees create a special hive - the queen's nest, in which the queen bee lays fertilized eggs; after the larvae hatch, the worker bees give them special treatment and use their bodies to The larvae are fed with the highly nutritious royal jelly produced, and when the larva develops into an adult, it becomes a new queen bee with reproductive capacity.

The new queen will lead some worker bees to fly to establish a new colony. Apis cerana Fabr. and A. mellifera L. are both commonly raised beneficial insects. During the breeding process, after the new queen bee is born, it must be manually divided into groups. Otherwise, a queen bee will lead a group of worker bees to fly away from the hive and the colony will be lost.

Beekeepers use artificial methods to produce royal jelly. In fact, they make some artificial royal jelly and put them in the beehive for the queen bee to lay eggs. When the larvae hatch, the worker bees are fed with royal jelly. , the beekeeper is about to take out the royal jelly. In fact, beekeepers use deception, which shows that even smart bees are sometimes deceived.

There are many drones, perhaps nearly a thousand in a group. The only duty of the drone is to mate with the queen bee. During the mating, the queen bee flies out of the nest and is followed by the drones in the swarm. This is called a nuptial flight.

The queen bee selects a mate through flight competition, and only the winner can become the mate. After mating, the drone's genitals fall off into the queen bee's genitals. At this time, the drone completes its life mission and dies.

After those drones who failed to mate with the queen returned to the nest, they only knew how to eat and drink, but did not know how to collect honey, becoming redundant lazy bees in the bee colony. As time goes by, the Gongfeng will expel them. Beekeepers are also unwilling to keep too many drones in the colony and consume honey, so they are artificially culled.

From this point of view, worker bees are the most numerous in this group. The number of worker bees that beekeepers maintain in a bee colony varies depending on the season, but is generally between 20,000 and 50,000 worker bees. Worker bees are the most industrious. The children's song "little bees, busy all day long, collecting nectar and making honey" only refers to worker bees. In addition to collecting pollen and making honey, worker bees also have tasks such as building nests, feeding larvae, cleaning the environment, and defending the colony. ?

From spring to late autumn, during the flowering season of plants, bees are busy every day. Winter is the only short period of leisure for bees. However, cold weather and low temperatures in the hive are detrimental to bees, because bees are cold-blooded animals, and their body temperature changes with the temperature of the surrounding environment. The extraordinarily intelligent little bee has come up with a special way to resist the cold.

When the temperature in the hive is as low as 13°C, they move closer to each other in the hive and form spherical clusters. The lower the temperature, the tighter the clusters, which reduces the surface area of ??the bee clusters and increases the density, preventing Too much cooling.

According to measurements, at the coldest time, the temperature inside the bee ball can still be maintained at around 24°C. At the same time, they also eat more honey and exercise more to generate heat to increase the temperature inside the nest.

When the weather is cold, the surface temperature of the bee ball is lower than the center of the ball. At this time, the bees on the surface of the good ball drill toward the center of the ball, while the bees in the center of the ball move outward. In this way, they take care of each other and continue to The earth repeatedly switches places to survive the cold winter.

How do they eat the honey stored in the hive during the overwintering period? The smart little bees have their own tricks. They do not need to disband the sphere and crawl out to get food. Instead, they obtain food by passing it to each other. This can keep the temperature inside the sphere constant or less changing, which is beneficial to safe overwintering.

Extended information:

In insect taxonomy, bees (Bee/Honey bee) belong to the order Hymenoptera, suborder Lepidoptera, Pintail, superfamily Apis, and family Apidae. Collectively, it is an important group of Hymenoptera.

According to fossil data, bees have been found in large numbers in the Late Eocene strata of the Tertiary Period. Many species of the Apidae family have huge economic value and are closely related to human life. There are records of bees and their uses in ancient China.

Many types of products or behaviors are closely related to medicine (such as honey, royal jelly, bee venom), agriculture (such as crop pollination), and industry (such as beeswax, propolis). They are called resource insects . The most familiar ones are Italian bees and Oriental bees that are artificially domesticated for making honey.

Bees belong to the order Hymenoptera and family Apidae. It is a kind of flying social insect, they are called resource insects. The body is 8-20 mm long, yellowish brown or dark brown, with dense hair; the head and chest are almost as wide;

The waist is slender than the chest and abdomen; the antennae are knee-shaped, the compound eyes are oval, and the mouthparts are chewing It has a sucking type, and its hind legs are powder-carrying feet; it has two pairs of membranous wings, the forewings are large and the hind wings are small, and the front and rear wings are linked by wing hooks; the abdomen is nearly oval, with less body hair than the chest, and there are stings at the end of the abdomen. Bees are insects that undergo complete metamorphosis and go through four stages in their lives: egg, larvae, pupa and adult.

Bees are insects with complete metamorphosis. All three types of bees go through four stages of development: egg, larvae, pupa and adult (adult bee). The four stages of bees are all morphologically different.

Egg: Banana-shaped, milky white, with slightly transparent egg membrane. The thinner end is the end of the abdomen, and the thicker end is the head. The eggs laid by the queen bee have the thinner end at the bottom of the nest and the thicker end toward the entrance of the nest. The embryo inside the egg develops into a larvae in 3 days.

Larvae: white worm-like. It is C-shaped at first. As the insect grows, it straightens and heads toward the nest. Feeding by worker bees during the larval stage. If the female larvae hatched from fertilized eggs are fed royal jelly with honey and pollen added to the larvae for the first three days, they will develop into worker bees. The same female larvae, if fed a large amount of royal jelly continuously during the larval stage, will develop into a queen bee.

At the end of the 6th day after the worker bee larvae grow, the worker bees seal the opening of the hive with a wax lid. The larvae in the capped nest spin silk into cocoons and then pupate. The capped larvae and pupae are collectively called the capped spleen, and the nest spleen with most of the capped caps is called the capped spleen (pupa spleen).

The cover of the worker bee pupa is slightly protruding, and the entire cover looks relatively flat. The cover of the drone pupa is raised and the nest is larger, so it is easy to distinguish between the two. Worker bee larvae pupate at the end of 2 days after capping.

Pupa: The pupa stage mainly involves the transformation and differentiation of internal organs to form various organs of the adult bee. The head, chest, and abdomen gradually appear, and the appendages are also revealed. The color gradually changes from milky white to darker. The mature pupa takes off its pupal shell, bites through the nest cover, and emerges as an adult bee.

Adult bee: The exoskeleton of the newly emerged bee is soft, the villi on the body surface are very soft, and the body color is lighter. Soon the bones harden, the wings straighten, and various organs in the body gradually mature.

Reference: Baidu Encyclopedia-Bees