Western Honey Bee

Honey bee colonies survive winter on stored honey, made when workers process and dehydrate flower nectar inside the hive. Honey does not rot or ferment under normal storage, though it crystallizes over time, and bees can only use it while liquid. In temperate climates a colony may eat 15 to 50 kg (33 to 110 lb) of honey over winter, depending on the season’s length and severity. As the cold sets in, workers cluster tightly around the queen and vibrate their flight muscles without flying, generating heat. The core often stays at about 25 to 36 °C (77 to 97 °F) even in freezing weather, while bees rotate between the insulating outer shell and the warm center.

Only female honey bees, workers and queens, can sting. The stinger is a modified egg-laying organ, and drones have none. A worker’s stinger is strongly barbed: when it lodges in thick mammal skin, the bee pulls away, the stinger tears from her abdomen, and she dies within minutes. Honey bees are the only stinging insects of their group with such a barbed sting, and stinging other insects usually does not kill a worker. Workers still defend the queen, brood, and honey, and an alarm pheromone released during a sting agitates nearby bees. Queens have a smoother stinger with smaller barbs, so they can sting repeatedly, mainly to kill rival queens before they emerge.

A forager that finds a rich food source returns to the hive and performs the waggle dance on the comb, a figure-eight pattern with a waggling run through the middle. The dance tells nestmates the direction of the food, using the sun’s position as a reference, and its distance, based on the forager’s memory of how far she flew. Nearby food is signaled by a simpler round dance that gives no direction. Other bees follow the dancer and can fly straight to the flowers instead of searching at random. Workers fly about 12 to 15 mph (19 to 24 km/h) and average 8 to 12 trips a day, with foraging trips averaging about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from the hive.

A honey bee colony works as one tightly coordinated unit, typically with a single reproductive queen, tens of thousands of female workers, and, in season, up to a few thousand male drones. A healthy hive may hold 40,000 to 80,000 bees in midsummer. Workers do nearly all the colony’s tasks: foraging, nursing larvae, building comb, and defending the hive. The queen focuses on laying eggs, roughly 1,000 to 2,500 a day at the seasonal peak, and typically lives 2 to 5 years. Drones live 4 to 8 weeks, do no hive work, and exist to mate with virgin queens; they are expelled before winter. This is eusociality: a reproductive division of labor in which most individuals never breed.

Honey bees coordinate through pheromones, chemical signals that regulate much of colony life. The queen releases a complex blend sometimes called “queen scent,” which signals her presence and keeps workers from reproducing. When these signals decline, workers recognize a failing queen. Each hive also carries a unique chemical signature that hivemates use to recognize one another. When a worker stings, she releases an alarm pheromone that agitates nearby bees and prompts a defensive response. Queens also use pheromones to attract drones on mating flights. Through these signals a colony of tens of thousands functions cohesively, even though no single bee oversees the whole.

Healthy honey bee colonies reproduce by swarming, typically once or twice a year. Workers raise new queens by feeding selected larvae royal jelly, a secretion all larvae receive for the first three days, but which queen-destined larvae keep receiving. The old queen then leaves with up to about half the workers (some sources say up to two-thirds). The swarm settles temporarily while scouts search for a new home, and a newly emerged queen takes over the original hive. Swarming lets one successful colony multiply itself. Separately, workers can replace a failing queen without swarming, which is why a queen’s declining pheromones matter to the whole colony.