Life of Apis mellifera Linnaeus

Honeybees are important pollinators for flowers, fruits, and vegetables.The scientific name of honeybee is Apis mellifera Linnaeus.They live on stored honey and pollen all winter and cluster into a ball to conserve warmth. All honeybees are social and cooperative insects. Members of the hive are divided into three types:

1. Workers forage for food
2. build and protect the hive, clean, and circulate air by beating their wings.
3. The queen's job is simple—she lays the eggs that will spawn the hive's next generation of bees.

There is usually only a single queen in a hive. If the queen dies, workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the worker females a special food called "royal jelly."

This elixir enables the worker to develop into a fertile queen.

• Bees have 5 eyes
• Bees are insects, so they have 6 legs
• Male bees in the hive are called drones
• Bees fly about 20 mph
• Female bees in the hive (except the queen) are called worker bees
• Number of eggs laid by queen: 2,000 per day is the high
• Losing its stinger will cause a bee to die
• Bees have been here about 30 million years!
• Bees carry pollen on their hind legs in a pollen basket or corbicula
• An average beehive can hold around 50,000 bees
• Foragers must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey
• The average forager makes about 1/12 th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime
• Average per capita honey consumption in the US is 1.3 pounds
• Bees have 2 pairs of wings

The principal form of communication among honey bees is through chemicals called pheromones
Bees are important because they pollinate approximately 130 agricultural crops in the US including fruit, fiber, nut, and vegetable crops. Bee pollination adds approximately 14 billion dollars annually to improved crop yield and quality.

Several hundred drones live in each hive during the spring and summer, but they are expelled for the winter months when the hive goes into a lean survival mode.

The greatest pollinators

Bees are part of the biodiversity on which we all depend for our survival.

They provide high-quality food—honey, royal jelly and pollen — and other products such as beeswax, propolis and honey bee venom

• Plant lots of flowers

Ensure your bees’ happiness by planting lots of flowers that they can use as sugars and proteins from the nectar and pollen. They need these to grow healthy and reproduce, so be sure to not only plant an abundance, but also a variety that bloom at different times and different heights. Not every bee eats the same!