It has been around for about a million years and is also known as Apis mellifera.
It is environmentally friendly and vital as a pollinator.
Let’s learn more about it from teketrek.
Facts about The Honey Bee
The honey bee belongs to the phylum Arthropoda, family Apidae.
The honey bee is the only insect that produces honey consumed by humans.
One of its main characteristics is its use of stinging mechanism against predators to protect the colony.
The honey produced by the honey bee contains all the necessary nutrients for life, including minerals, vitamins, and water.
The honey bee has 170 odor receptors.
Its sense of smell helps in recognizing relatives inside the bee cell and finding food by scent.
The honey bee has an extremely strong sense of smell.
Due to this sense, it can differentiate between hundreds of flower species and know if the flowers contain pollen or nectar.
The honey bee can flap its wings at an astonishing speed of around 200 beats per second, making it famous for its buzzing sound.
The honey bee can fly at speeds of up to 15 miles per hour.
A honey bee can collect approximately one kilogram of honey, flying around 90,000 miles.
During a nectar-collecting trip, a honey bee visits between 50 to 100 flowers.
A colony contains between 20,000 and 60,000 bees with one queen.
Worker honey bees are female and live for about 6 weeks in active seasons and 3 months in winter, performing all the work.
The Honey Bee Specification
The brain: It is oval in shape and the size of a sesame seed.
Despite this, it has an amazing ability to learn and remember things.
Eyes: The honey bee is characterized by having compound eyes, which require 50 wax scales to build in females and 120 wax scales in males.
Age, eggs: The queen bee can live up to 2 years and is the only bee that lays up to 2500 eggs per day.
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Types of Bees
There are many types of bees, some of which produce honey and some do not.
The most important types of honey-producing bees include:
- Giant Honey Bee (Apis dorsata): This bee lives in the wild on trees and rocks and is found in the Asian region. It builds a large-sized comb only.
- Dwarf Honey Bee (Apis florea): This bee is small in size and is not domesticated. It produces only one comb and lives in South Asia.
- Indian Honey Bees: This type of bee lives in India. It is larger than the dwarf bee and can be domesticated.
- Western Honey Bees: Named after its occurrence in the western Himalayas region. It is called universal because it is the only type that has spread worldwide.
Honey Bee Strains:
It divided into three groups:
African Strain:
In Africa, there are four strains, including:
- Moroccan Honey Bees: Small-sized bees inhabiting countries from Morocco to Libya in North Africa. It has few short hair, also characterized by its sharp nature.
- Egyptian Honey Bees: Small-sized bees with yellow color and shiny white hairs on their bodies. They are aggressive and do not tolerate cold, with low honey production.
- Cape Honeybees: This name is due to the presence of this breed in a narrow area on the southwest coast of the city of Cape Town in South Africa.
- African Honey Bees: Found in wide areas of Africa, from deserts to forests, stretching north from Senegal and Niger to Zambia in the south.
European breeds:
- Black Honey Bees: Also known as German bees, originating from Northern Europe, Western Alps, and Central Russia.
- Carniolan Honey Bee: This strain was the main reason for the spread of beekeeping in Egypt.
- Italian Honey Bees: Originating from Italy, these bees are somewhat small in size. They have relatively long tongues (6.3 – 6.6 mm). This strain has contributed to the spread and flourishing of beekeeping in the last hundred years.
Eastern Strains:
- Caucasian Honey Bees: Originating from highlands and valleys in the central Caucasus, similar in appearance and size to Carniolan bees. The color of the chitin is dark, and there are brown spots on the first stripes on the abdomen, the chest hairs in males are black, while in female workers they are grey.
- Anatolian Honey Bees: Native to Turkey, now bred there in mud cells, calm in temperament, large-sized with a dark yellow color.
- Armenian Honey Bee: Lives in Armenia, a yellow aggressive strain active in honey production.
- Cyprus Honey Bee: Resembles Italian bees but smaller in size, believed to be the origin of Syrian, Palestinian, and Italian strains, very active in honey collection.
- Yemeni Honey Bees: Found in East Africa, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, West Asia including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Oman.
- Syrian Honey Bees: Two varieties exist – fierce Siafi and obedient Ghanami. Difficult to distinguish externally, found in Syria and Lebanon.
- Palestinian Honey Bees: Known as Holy Land bees, historically significant, believed to be related to Egyptian bees.
Standard Strain:
Characterized by active queens laying eggs early in the season in large numbers.
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What do honey bees eat?
Honey bees feed on grasses and flower nectar.
During winter, honey bees feed on the stored food they collected during the warmer months.
In winter, bees form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
FAQs about the honey bee
What is the history of the honey bee?
The origins of honeybees
It is thought that bees originally evolved from hunting wasps which acquired a taste for nectar and decided to become vegetarians. Fossil evidence is sparse but bees probably appeared on the planet about the same time as flowering plants in the Cretaceous period, 146 to 74 million years ago.
Why is it called a honey bee?
The genus name Apis is Latin for “bee”, and mellifera is the Latin for “honey-bearing” or “honey carrying”, referring to the species’ production of honey.
What is another name for honey bee?
The best-known honey bee is the western honey bee, (Apis mellifera), which was domesticated for honey production and crop pollination. The only other domesticated bee is the eastern honey bee (Apis cerana), which occurs in South, Southeast, and East Asia.
What do honey bees do?
Honeybees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year, including more than 130 types of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Honeybees also produce honey, worth about $3.2 million in 2017 according to USDA-National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).
How do honey bees communicate?
Honeybees have evolved an extraordinary form of communication known as the “waggle” dance. It is highly symbolic, separated as it is in both time and space from the activity it …grew out of (discovering a nectar source) and the activity it will spur on (getting other bees to go to that nectar source).
Which country is famous for honey bees?
India has the largest number of beehives, totaling around 12.6 million, followed by China with about 9.4 million.
In conclusion, it is important to highlight the significance of honey bees as beneficial insects that produce valuable honey.
They are essential to human life and we hope that this article has provided you with valuable information and amazing facts to help you learn more about honey bees.
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