Inner structure of the honey bee

Compared to vertebrates, insects do not have an internal skeleton. The open blood circulation, pronounced sense organs, a nervous system and a specialized digestive system characterize all insects. With the honey bee, after eating, the food reaches the honey bladder with the help of the mouthparts via the pharynx and the esophagus. This serves as a transport container for nectar and water. The transported substances can be choked out again at any time. Most of the collected nectar is processed into honey in the beehive.

The honey bladder can hold about 60mm of food. To fill the honey bladder with nectar, the bee has to seek out 1500 clover flowers. A valve funnel protrudes from the honey bladder into the midgut. When there is a need for food, this organ takes the necessary nourishment from the honey bladder. This ensures that no food can flow back into the honey bladder. The actual digestion and the transfer of nutrients into the blood take place in the midgut. The Malpighian vessels work like the kidneys in vertebrates. They take up the waste material from the blood and put it in the fecal bladder. If the bee does not fly for a long time and remains in the beehive, it is not allowed to shed any feces. The coexistence of the many bees in the hive does not allow defecation for reasons of hygiene. This explains why, for example, in winter the fecal bladder fills the bees' entire abdomen.

The bees do not have a closed blood circulation with veins and arteries, but the blood is in the entire inner bee body and flows around the organs. The heart tube pumps the blood from back to front directly to the brain. The blood flows back on the stomach side so that the blood is constantly in motion. In bees, the blood only has the task of transporting nutrients. Oxygen is absorbed through ten breathing holes arranged in pairs on the abdomen and chest. The breathing holes are connected to the internal organs by a system of tubes made of tracheas. The oxygen is supplied directly. The bees can also actively exhale by squeezing their abdomen.

Bees have a highly developed system of sensory organs. The sensory organs in connection with the nervous system and brain enable good orientation and mobility. Sex organs are only present in the queen and the drone. Worker bees are female animals whose ovaries are undeveloped. The glands are of particular importance.



How long does a honey bee live?

A colony of bees forms a complex superorganism. In it, workers, drones and queens have different tasks that also determine their lifespan. There is therefore no general answer to the question “How old do bees get?”. The question of the average age is inextricably linked to the life purpose of a bee. Most people use the term "honeybee" to refer to those workers in the beehive who constantly swarm out in summer to collect nectar and pollen. Their life cycle runs in precisely regulated phases:

Day 1 to 3: Three days pass before the larvae of a worker hatch from the egg. Day 4 to 9: The larvae spend the following 6 days in open combs and are intensively fed by adult workers. During this period of its life a bee larvae a thousand times its hatching weight. Day 10 to 21: In this phase the bee larvae pupate several times in capped combs and then hatch as adult workers. Honey bees are therefore already 3 weeks "old" before they start to work in the beehive. Day 22 to 24: The hatched bees clean their bodies and their combs. They line the latter with a thin film of propolis. In this way, the breeding grounds are ready for the queen bee to lay eggs again. In this phase of life, beekeepers call cleaning bees. Day 25 to 26: Then the workers prepare the food for the upcoming larvae from pollen. Experts refer to the insects as nurse bees at the appropriate age. Day 27 to 34: The workers now have trained fodder glands on their heads and supply larvae and queen with food. Day 35 to 37: In some workers, a wax-forming gland is now activated. In this section, the worker bees build new combs and cover the larvae 'combs for their pupation stage. In beekeepers' jargon, these bees are called construction bees. Day 38 to 40: As guard bees at the entrance of the beehive, the workers ward off intruders. During this time, their lining and wax glands regress. This is in preparation for their next task as a foraging bee. Day 41 to 63: The workers swarm out and collect water, pollen, nectar and the basic materials for propolis.

The entire lifespan of a honey bee is around 9 weeks. She spends three of them as eggs, larvae and pupae, three more exclusively in the beehive as a stick bee. In the last three weeks of its life, a bee leaves the beehive regularly to collect food. All workers of a colony are subject to this cycle - except for the last brood of the year. The task of the so-called "winter bees" is to ensure the survival of the colony during the cold season. To do this, they are equipped with the body's own protein store, which enables them to have a lifespan of 7 months and more. When the queen starts laying eggs again in February, the winter bees raise the new brood and the shorter cycle of summer bees begins.

What determines whether summer or winter bees hatch?

As part of her doctoral thesis, bee researcher Fiola Bock was able to show in 2005 that temperature alone determines whether summer or winter bees hatch. In this way the bee colony adapts to the prevailing environmental conditions. If the temperature falls below a certain threshold in autumn, the lower incubation temperature initiates epigenetic changes in the larvae and creates winter bees. The temperature in the brood honeycomb differs only slightly from that in summer: In the experiment, short-lived summer bees hatched at 36 degrees, long-lived winter bees at an incubation temperature of 34.5 degrees.

How long do drones live?

The male bees do not take part in the work processes in the beehive, but aim to mate with a queen bee. If they reach this, they die immediately afterwards. From the end of June, the male bees are systematically pushed out of the beehive and perish due to a lack of food. Their average lifespan is around 1 to 3 months.

How long does a queen bee live?

The only fertile female bee in a colony is the queen. At the beginning of her life she mates with several drones from foreign races and stores the sperm in a seminal vesicle inside her body. Fertilized from this supply, it lays eggs for around five years - at peak times up to 2000 eggs a day. When the life span of a queen bee comes to an end after 4 to 5 years, the supply of her seminal vesicle is exhausted and she produces more and more unfertilized eggs from which drones hatch. This development gives the bee colony the signal to start rearing a new queen.

The bee language



One of the most amazing phenomena in bees is their ability to communicate with one another. Specially "trained" search bees set off in search of food and then return home to the beehive. By dancing on the honeycomb, they tell where the food source is. The other bees partly join in the movements and sniff out the food they have brought with them.

The waggle dance indicates a source of costume that is more than 100 m away. The dance direction indicates the angle between the straight lines "Apiary - Sun" and "Apiary - Trachtpflanze". With the progressive change in the position of the sun, this angle changes and with it the dance direction. The number of dance turns (right-left, left-right) in a certain time unit indicates the distance from the traditional plant. If the source of traditional costumes is far away, the dance rhythm is slower.

The search bee can not only indicate the distance, but also the direction of the food source. If the middle part of the figure eight points exactly in the direction of the perpendicular to the sun, then the food source is exactly in the direction of the current position of the sun. If the middle part is shifted by 30 ° to the right to the sun during the dance, then the bees have to fly with a deviation of 30 ° from the position of the sun!

In this way, food sources can be found up to a distance of 10 kilometers from all foraging bees. The longer the search bee dances, the more productive the source of food is. In a simple round dance, the source of food is in the immediate vicinity of the beehive. The bees recognize the direction even in cloudy weather. They perceive polarized light with their compound eyes and thus determine the direction. The language of bees was discovered and described for the first time by the Austrian zoologist and Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch (1886-1982). Honey bees communicate not only with the dances, but also with scents, touches and probably also with wing movements. Red flowers are difficult to see. With blue flowers, however, they have no problems with their compound eyes. Once you have explored a source of food, you will repeatedly fly to and find your beehive again at any time.

Burial in the bee colony - people always die!



Bees carry their dead conspecifics out of the hive - and not without reason. This behavior ensures that brood, bees and supplies are not contaminated by bacteria or mold.

Microorganisms that are created when the dead decayed could well multiply in the colony of bees in the warm temperatures. Carrying out the dead also prevents the smell of decay from attracting potential enemies.

This behavior is also known in other colony-forming insects, such as ants. American researchers have examined this area of hygienic behavior, the “undertaking behavior” or the “burial of corpses in the bee colony”, and found that individual workers carry dead conspecifics up to 150m from the hive. The genetic analysis of workers has shown that there are sibling lines that carry out dead animals particularly often and carry them particularly far. Burial is so to speak “in the blood” of these animals.

Biomass bee



The honey bee plays a key role in the natural balance. Bees pollinate a large number of wild and cultivated plants, the seeds and fruits of which are the basic foodstuffs for many animal groups. The value of this achievement is difficult to determine, but whoever tries it can easily run into billions.

The bee colony also produces a large amount of biomass. Biomass is not just the nectar and exuded wax; the animals themselves also represent valuable biomass. An average bee colony breeds around 150,000 animals a year. A bee weighs around 100mg. This means that 150,000 animals make up around 15kg of biomass.

If we neglect in our calculation that the colony strength is greater when wintering than when wintering, then these 15kg flow completely into the natural balance and serve as food for birds, small mammals and insects.

The figure of 15kg sounds small at first, but if we assume that around 1,000,000 bee colonies live in Germany, then these bee colonies will produce around 15,000 tons of biomass. This number is perhaps easier to measure when you consider that an African elephant weighs about 5 tons. The beekeepers in Germany look after - so to speak - an elephant herd of 3,000 animals.

When space in the beehive becomes too tight, the beehive prepare to swarm. The people swarmed out with the old queen and looked for a new home. If the beekeeper does not catch the swarm, he will look for a new place in a hollow tree and a "wild" bee colony will emerge. In winter, the entire beehive overwinters in the beehive. The people feed on the sugar-rich honey supply. The bees generate body heat, which keeps the heat in the beehive constant at 15 to 20 ° C. The people come together to form a tight cluster inside the building. A colony of 20,000 bees needs around 12 to 15 kilograms of honey for this heat generation from October to May. In February the queen starts laying eggs again and the colony heats the honeycombs to 32 to 35 ° C. This is the optimal temperature for the brood to develop.

Beehive

Bees live in a social community in the beehive. Such a colony can consist of up to 70,000 bees. Originally the bee colonies settled in hollow trees or in rock niches. Today most of the bees rely on the housing provided by the beekeeper. The beekeeper inserts movable initial strips into the beehive and / or the top bar hive. The bees build wax honeycombs in them. The bees store their supply of pollen and honey in the hexagonal honeycomb cells. Other combs are used to raise the offspring.

In the honeycomb construction, the hive bees form a building community. They exude liquid wax from their wax glands, which hardens immediately when exposed to air. With the help of the secretions from the salivary and maxillary glands, the workers chew the wax and attach it to the intended place. The finished honeycombs are an architectural masterpiece. A honeycomb made of 40 grams of beeswax can hold two to three kilograms of honey, for example.

In addition to the honeybee living in human care, there are 500 other bee species in Central Europe. Most of these bees are hermits and do not live in a colony. They look for simple holes in trees and set up their breeding chambers there. Creating nesting aids for wild bees is an easy way to observe these bees.

Foraging leg of the worker bee

To collect the protein-containing pollen, the bee crawls into a flower and bites open the anthers with its jaws. Then she rolls around in the pollen that sticks to her body. She has previously rubbed the body with vomited nectar so that the pollen sticks. After leaving the flower, the bee cleans its body with quick movements of its legs.

Front and middle legs collect the pollen from the head and chest and pass it to the brushes on the inside of the rear legs. Then the bee combs out the brushes with the comb on the opposite leg. The pollen hanging in the comb is moved upwards into the outer basket by moving the joint between the splint and the foot with the help of the pollen pusher. The middle legs press the pollen firmly. This creates panties that are worn in the beehive and serve as food for the larvae.

Honey production

A visit to a flower by a bee is a fascinating process in nature. The flower provides the bee what it needs for the bee colony and at the same time enables the flower to reproduce. The flower excretes the sugary nectar at its bottom. The bees need this "attractant" for their own nutrition and for the nutrition of their offspring. At the same time, the bee body is also wetted with pollen. If the bee flies to another plant, pollination may occur and the plant can reproduce.

In colonies of bees that live in the forests, the bees also collect honeydew, a sugar juice that the bees find on trees such as fir, spruce, oak or linden that give off honeydew. Honeydew is created by the fact that bark and scale insects pierce the sap of the plants and filter out the proteins necessary for their own growth. Honey that comes from these bee colonies is marketed as "forest honey" or "fir honey". Forest honey is darker than blossom honey and stays liquid for a relatively long time.

When the forager bees come back to their burrow, the collected products are passed on to the hive bees. Each time the receiving bee "swallows" the nectar and mixes in enzymes from its fodder glands that change the composition of the sugar in the nectar:

Multiple sugars (cane sugar) are converted into simple sugars (grape and fructose). At the same time, the nectar is thickened with the removal of water. Through the multiple transfer of the processed nectar, honey is created in this way in a "joint effort". The bees store the finished and refined honey in the honeycomb cells and close them with a wax lid. The bee colony has a constant supply for feeding the brood or for wintering.

"Honey is the sweet stuff,

which bees produce by taking in nectarian juices or other sweet juices found on living parts of plants, enriching them with endogenous substances, changing them in their bodies, storing them in honeycombs and allowing them to mature ".

This sentence clarifies the function of bees as "honey makers".

To collect honey, the beekeeper takes the honeycombs out of the beehive and puts them in a sling. As a result of the quick turning process, the honey runs down the inner wall of the centrifugal container and can be collected below. Since the bee colony normally needs the honey for wintering, the beekeeper replaces the lost honey with sugar water. Approximately 20 kg of sugar are added to each bee colony. The bees process the sugar like nectar into honey and store it in the honeycomb cells.

Finished honey mainly consists of fructose (38%) and grape sugar (31%), malt sugar and cane sugar make up a smaller proportion (5%). According to legal regulations, the water content must not exceed 21%. The content of minerals and vitamins is relatively low (less than 1%). In this respect, honey primarily serves as an energizing source of food for people. Fresh honey can be recognized by the fact that it is thin or viscous. With older honey, the sugars have crystallized out. However, this does not say anything about the quality of the honey. High quality honey is characterized by a uniform appearance and a pleasant taste typical of honey.

new text