Effects Of Honey Bees

The initial reactions to a swarm of honey bees are fear and distress. Honey bees are frowned upon because of the annoying noise they emit and the pointy stinger on their abdomen. To the mainstream population, honey bees are just pesky insects whose primary goals are to sting random individuals and make honey. Honey bees are not another species of pesky creatures that deserve to be fumigated into extinction; they are insects with fascinating lives. The honey bees that buzz noisily around an office have a much more complicated life than annoying people for petty amusement. The honey bee’s meticulous lifestyle inside of their colonies, their vital need for communication with each other, and their species-dependent form of fertilization makes them

A beehive colony is the headquarters to a swarm of honey bees; it’s where the bees go to carry out important tasks necessary for their survival. Although it may not seem like much can go on in a small compacted cluster of wax, there are thousands of things going on at one time. A small beehive can be inhabited by to up to 60,000 bees, each bee doing their part to make the bee hive more efficient (The Colony and Its Organization). Each one of these bees are genetically-programed to know exactly what their roles in the society are. There are three different kinds of bees in a beehive: the queen bee, worker bees, and drone bees. A beehive consists of one main queen bee, hundreds of drone bees, and thousands of worker bees. A bee’s type is determined by its gender, but bee sex determination isn’t as submissive and meek as human sex determination. Honey bees use a haplodiploid genetic system to determine sex. In this unique genetic sex determination system, “[a male drone bee] normally develops from unfertilized eggs, which are haploid and have just one set of chromosomes. The fertilized honey bee eggs, which are diploid and have two sets of chromosomes, differentiate

Honey bees show tremendous amounts of teamwork, so it’s extremely vital for them to be able to communicate. Entomologists and behavioral scientists have admired the fellowship amongst bees for generations and have introduced innumerable studies that suggest three ways that bees communicate. One of the three forms of the honey bee language is a combination of movements known as “The Waggle Dance” (Hadley). The purpose of the dance is to alert other bees about the location of nearby food sources over 150 meters away. Prior to the special waggle dance’s performance, the colony will send a small group of scout bees to forage and locate potential food sources for the hive. If these scout bees are able to successfully find a suitable food source, they return to the bee hive and inform the colony of their findings by performing the elaborate dance. The dance is performed on an appropriate honeycomb by the returning scout bees. The dance is initiated by a honey bee walking straight while forcefully shaking its abdomen and generating a loud buzzing sound. The dance pattern as a whole appears as “a figure-eight, with the bee repeating the straight portion of the movement each time it circles to the center again” (Hadley). The distance of the newly discovered food source is determined by the speed and distance of the dance executed by the bee. To demonstrate the location of the new food