The art of caring for and managing colonies of honeybees is known as beekeeping. Probably the best known bee, the honeybee's honey has been used by humans for thousands of years. A queen bee is typically an adult, mated female ( gyne) that lives in a colony or hive of honey bees. The beekeeper can then safely remove the honeycomb, which is then either crushed or centrifuged to remove the honey. Common Name: Honeybees Scientific Name: Apis mellifera Type: Invertebrates Diet: Herbivore Group Name: Colony, swarm Average Life Span In The Wild: Up to 5 years Size: 0.4 to 0.6 inches. Queens emerge in 16 days, workers in about 21 days (on average), and drones in 24 days. Honeybees are said to be eusocial because they live in complex societies where thousands cooperate to find food, defend the group, and reproduce. [92] To begin the process of reproduction in a honeybee colony, workers begin to produce queen larvae while simultaneously finding a place to create a new hive. Scientists are not sure what is causing this collapse. [49] Adult worker honey bees require 4mg of utilizable sugars per day and larvae require about 59.4mg of carbohydrates for proper development. Bee - Wikipedia To infest new hosts, the mites must find newly emerged bees; after three days, the bristles (setae) guarding the spiracles are firm enough to prevent the mites' entry into the tracheae. Identification Numbers. honey bee. During the swarming season, in the presence of a weak queen or in the absence of a queen, workers may lay unfertilized eggs, which give rise to drones. Examples of agents that have been particularly devastating for colonies in Europe and North America include the nonnative parasites Varroa destructor and Tropilaelaps clareae. In the case of those honey bee species with open combs (e.g., A. dorsata), would-be predators are given a warning signal that takes the form of a "wave" that spreads as a ripple across a layer of bees densely packed on the surface of the comb when a threat is perceived, and consists of bees momentarily arching their bodies and flicking their wings. [1][2] After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current cosmopolitan distribution of honey bees, introducing multiple subspecies into South America (early 16th century), North America (early 17th century), and Australia (early 19th century).[1]. Scientific Name. [26], Africanized honey bees (known colloquially as "killer bees") are hybrids between European stock and the East African lowland subspecies A. m. scutellata; they are often more aggressive than European honey bees and do not create as much of a honey surplus, but are more resistant to disease and are better foragers. Worker bees feature a nearly all-black head with a body coloring of golden brown and black with dull orange patches. That the western honey bee has been intensively managed by humans for many millennia including hybridization and introductions has apparently increased the speed of its evolution and confounded the DNA sequence data to a point where little of substance can be said about the exact relationships of many A. mellifera subspecies. Required fields are marked *, Frequently Asked Questions on Honey Bee Scientific Name. Colony collapse disorder (CCD), which was first reported in 2006 in the United States, caused massive colony losses and presented significant challenges for crop pollination, a major service of the beekeeping industry in North America. Apis florea and Apis andreniformis are small honey bees of southern and southeastern Asia. The dance language is also used during the process of colony fission, or swarming, when scouts communicate the location and quality of nesting sites.[114]. Is it a pest? Honey bees are known for their construction of perennial colonial nests from wax, the large size of their colonies, and surplus production and storage of honey, distinguishing their hives as a prized foraging target of many animals, including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers. The first type, the "honey bee", is actually not a bee at all. The genetics of the western honey bee (A. mellifera) are unclear. Species. Honey bees have a tiny structure that appears similar to a human midbrain, so if it functions the same way they may possibly be able to achieve a small amount of simple awareness of their bodies. The process of managing and breeding honey bees for acquiring honey and beeswax is known as apiculture or beekeeping. Omissions? [79] They produce a variety of pheromones that regulate behavior of workers, and helps swarms track the queen's location during the swarming.[79]. The hatching mites eat away at the pupa, causing deformities as well as spreading disease. They perform lifes basic physiological processesprocessing food, circulating resources, regulating temperature, moisture, and airflow within the hive, triggering behaviors, and responding to stimuli. Nurse bees have the ability to selectively transfer sterols to larvae through brood food. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. As with honey, beeswax is gathered by humans for various purposes such as candle making, waterproofing, soap and cosmetics manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, art, furniture polish and more. Bees also come in a variety of colours, besides the stereotypical black and yellow. Another form of worker-based policing is aggression toward fertile females. Whats the Difference Between a Bee and a Wasp? It seems to have originated in eastern tropical Africa and spread from there to Europe and eastwards into Asia to the Tian Shan range. The colder the weather is outside, the more compact the cluster becomes. [82][83] The gut microbial composition of workers varies according to the landscape and plant species they forage, such as differences in rapeseed crops,[82] and with different hive tasks, such as nursing or food processing. In Japan, where A. mellifera is vulnerable to local hornets and disease, the Japanese honey bee A. cerana japonica is used in its place. Is It Honey Bee or Honeybee? Bumble Bee or Bumblebee? Who Decides the Weinstock, George M.; Robinson, Gene E., & the Honeybee Genome Sequencing Consortium. The original breeding experiment for which the East African lowland honey bees were brought to Brazil in the first place has continued (though not as originally intended). 400 Creative Honey Bee Names Ideas That You Will Like - WorthStart The bee was used as a symbol of government by Emperor Napoleon I of France. [101], A 2020 study of Apis cerana in Vietnam found that they use feces and even human urine to defend their hives against raids by hornets (Vespa soror), a strategy not replicated by their European and North American counterparts,[102] though collection and use of feces in nest construction is well-known in stingless bees. Kingdom. Credit. ; They have a pair of antennae that are attached to their head. The queens, however, do not reach this point immediately. They have dense hairs on the pronotum and sparser hair on the abdomen. If you want to know the common name, scientific name, order, family, genus, species and author, the ESA database provides it. They are popular among beekeepers in Brazil. Honey Bee - Texas A&M University By some accounts, Linnaeus later became dissatisfied with the name he bestowed upon the bee, and argued to change the name from Apis mellifera, Latin for honey-bearing bee," to Apis mellifica, or honey-making bee." If you like word derivations, you know that melli (honey) is the root for the French word miel meaning "honey.". Write the scientific name of the most common species of honey bee [92] The queen larvae will then hatch at the old hive, and the queens will fight one another until there is only a single queen left to begin reproducing. Type in a name and a drop-down menu appears. Honey Bee (Apis mellifera) | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Since then, the use and cultivation of honey has been an important part of human culture, from Ancient Greece, where it was deemed celestial nectar, a drink fit for the Gods, to today where it is produced by the majority of cultures and countries around the world. The black dwarf honey bee, Apis andreniformis Smith 1858 ( Figure 1 ), is a small dark honey bee found in Southeast Asia. [37] When honey bees are present as an invasive species in an area, they compete for flowers with native pollinators, which can actually push out the native species. Learn to love the scientific names of bees - Honey Bee Suite Podcasts from the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), produced by Atlantic Public Mediaand funded by the Museum of Comparative Zoologyat Harvard University. Number of eggs laid by queen: 2,000 per day is the high. The Africanized honeybees, known for their rigorous defense of their colonies and for their tendency to swarm . Honey bees also have an interesting form of communication they dance. Buzzing About the Honey Bee Genome - National Institutes of Health (NIH) If a colony does not have a queen or she is unable to reproduce, workers are able to lay unfertilized eggs that may develop into males. Destruction of honeycombs also result in honey leaking and being wasted. Apis mellifera. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. The common names follow a rule that was explained by Snodgrass (Citation 1956) in the preface to Anatomy of the Honey Bee: First, it must be explained why the name of the bee appears in the title as two words, though "honeybee" is the customary form in the literature of apiculture. For this reason, honeybees have been domesticated by humans for centuries. Only two species have been truly domesticated: Apis mellifera and Apis cerana. mellifera), also called Africanized bee or killer bee, hybrid honeybee resulting from the accidental release of African honeybees into the Western Hemisphere in 1957 and their subsequent crossbreeding with local European honeybees. ; You can use the illustrations below to . Koschevnikov's honey bee (Apis koschevnikovi) is often referred to in the literature as the "red bee of Sabah"; however, A. koschevnikovi is pale reddish in Sabah State, Borneo, Malaysia, but a dark, coppery color in the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, Indonesia. Besides producing honey, honeybees play an important role in agriculture as pollinators of a wide variety of domesticated plants. [103][104], The stings of honey bees are barbed and therefore embed themselves into the sting site, and the sting apparatus has its own musculature and ganglion which keep delivering venom even after detachment. Apis mellifera. There is an equal division of labor in the colony. They do not defend the hive or kill intruders, and do not have a stinger. The details of the signalling being used vary from species to species; for example, the two smallest species, Apis andreniformis and A. florea, dance on the upper surface of the comb, which is horizontal (not vertical, as in other species), and worker bees orient the dance in the actual compass direction of the resource to which they are recruiting. One of its subspecies, the Indian honey bee (A.c.indica), was domesticated and kept in hives in a fashion similar to A. mellifera, though on a more limited, regional scale. Together, they function as one mighty superorganism. It is incorrect to run the two words together, as in dragonfly or butterfly, which are appropriate because dragonflies and butterflies are not flies[6] and have no connection with dragons or butter. 1. [34] Indeed, for plant species with more specialized pollinators, experiments show that increased honeybee visitation can actually reduce pollination, both where honey bees are non-native[35] and even where they are native. [76] They are expelled from the hive during the winter months when the hive's primary focus is warmth and food conservation. Bees of various types other than honey bees are also domesticated and used for pollination or other means around the world, including Tetragonula iridipennis in India, the blue orchard bee for tree nut and fruit pollination in the United States, and a number of species of Bombus (bumblebees) for pollination in various regions globally, such as tomatoes, which are not effectively pollinated by honey bees. Kellie Schmitt of CNN described the dish as one of "Shanghai's weirdest foods". [a][65][66], Adult wild honeybees are also consumed as a food in parts of China, including Yunnan. Worker bees combine pollen, honey and glandular secretions and allow it to ferment in the comb to make bee bread. Defense can vary based on the habitat of the bee. [39][40] Apples, blueberries and cherries, for example, are 90 percent dependent on honeybee pollination. It has not been possible yet to resolve its relationship to the Bornean honey bee A. c. nuluensis and Apis nigrocincta from the Philippines to satisfaction; some researchers argue that these are indeed distinct species, but that A. cerana as defined is still paraphyletic, consisting of several separate species,[14] though other researchers argue cerana is a single monophyletic species. Taxonomy of Honeybee Characteristics of Honeybee Life Cycle of Honeybee Types of Honeybee Uses of Honeybees Things to Remember Previous Year's Questions Sample Questions Adult worker honey bees consume 3.44.3mg of pollen per day to meet a dry matter requirement of 6674% protein. [47] Dietary proteins are broken down into amino acids, ten of which are considered essential to honey bees: methionine, tryptophan, arginine, lysine, histidine, phenylalanine, isoleucine, threonine, leucine, and valine. [59] They use the wax to form the walls and caps of the comb. Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, This extinct stingless bee, which lived between 1520 million years ago, is covered in ancient pollen. Honey bees are insects and have five characteristics that are common to most insects. Honey bees are native to Eurasia, and are also introduced to the other continents by humans. [31] [32], Of all the honey bee species, only A. mellifera has been used extensively for commercial pollination of fruit and vegetable crops. Unfertilized eggs develop into drones, whereas fertilized eggs develop into females, which may be either workers or virgin queens. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. The genome of the malaria-carrying mosquito ( Anopheles gambiae) was completed in 2002 and that of the fruit fly ( Drosophila melanogaster ), which is commonly used in genetics research, was completed in 2000. The wings have tiny teeth so they can lock together when the bee is flying. This has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder" (CCD) and was at first unexplained. Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Other solitary native bees and wasps may look like honey bees, but are not aggressive, and do not have a barbed sting. Plants pollinated in this way tend to produce more viable seeds. The scientific name of the most common species of honeybee reared commercially in artificial hives in India is Apis indica. His argument was presumably unsuccessful as the bee still bears the erroneous name. Varroa mites are arguably the biggest threat to honey bees in the United States. Classification of western honey bees - Honey Bee Suite Eastern Apis species include three or fourspecies, including A. koschevnikovi, Apis nigrocincta, and A. cerana. Apis mellifera scutellata Lepeletier (Ellis and Ellis 2008; Sheppard and Smith 2000) Common Name. Harvard scientists have identified one commonly used variety of pesticide, neonicotinoids, as a possible culprit. Common Name. In the hive, pollen is used as a protein source necessary during brood-rearing. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. The worker bees huddle around the queen bee at the center of the cluster, shivering to keep the center between 27C (81F) at the start of winter (during the broodless period) and 34C (93F) once the queen resumes laying. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. In these rare situations, other worker bees in the hive who are genetically more related to the queen's sons than those of the fertile workers will patrol the hive and remove worker-laid eggs. Not all bees are like this, for example, the carpenter bee looks like a bumblebee insect, but is more of a solitary bee. Experiments confirming this hypothesis have shown a correlation between higher mating rates and increased rates of worker policing in many species of social hymenoptera. All honey bees live in colonies where the workers sting intruders as a form of defense, and alarmed bees release a pheromone that stimulates the attack response in other bees.
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