"The Honeybee" Apis mellifera L. (Family Apidae)

It is to the honeybee, one of man's oldest insect friends, that we are indebted for honey, beeswax and most important of all, the fertilization of many of our cropbearing plants. The honeybee is a social insect living in large colonies of from 20,000 to 80,000 individuals. There are five species of honeybees known: Apis mellifera (common honeybee); Apis dorsata (giant honeybee); Apis laboriosa (giant honeybee); Apis cerana (indian honeybee) and Apis florea (dwarf honeybee).

Apis mellifera is found worldwide and consists of a number of races or subspecies. It is been mentioned four subspecies of Apis mellifera occurring in Europe, three oriental subspecies and 12 African subspecies. These races vary in their nature. Italian bees, Apis mellifera ligusta, are generally gentle creatures, whereas German bees, Apis mellifera mellifera, are the reverse. However, it should be noted that even the normally gentle Italian bee, when provoked, will unsheathe its dagger. The weather often affects the temper of bees, and on windy, cloudy days, when they are unable to forage for nectar, pollen, etc, they are somewhat cross or frustrated, and they may "take it out" on some innocent passerby.

One honeybee with a nasty disposition is the hybrid Brazilian honeybee. This hybrid resulted when African bees brought to Brazil in 1956 escaped and bred with native bees. The African bees were imported to improve production in the bee keeping industry. African bees are very industrious, foraging earlier in the day and working longer in the evening. They also can work at higher or lower temperatures and thus produce more honey per year than the European strains. However, they are very aggressive, sting with little provocation and pursue their victims up to 328 feet. (Italian bees will normally only pursue about 33 feet). Presently the Africanized bees are widespread in South Africa. They have become established in Mexico, and are also established in Texas since 1983 A swarm of them were transported to Southern California in 1985, but they were eradicated. The effect of this bee on the United States beekeeping industry is uncertain. Also uncertain is how far north they will be able to survive.

The Castes. Three types of individuals or castes can at one time or another be found in a honeybee colony, including the queen (a fertile female), worker (infertile female) and a drone (male). There is only one egg-laying queen in a hive. The bulk of the colony consists of workers who build and repair the hive, forage for nectar and pollen, produce wax and honey, feed the young and protect the hive against enemies. Worker bees and wasps are unmated females. Worker wasps can at the end of the season produce unfertilized eggs which develop into males! The males have but one purpose in life and that is to mate with virgin queens. Once they have done this they died. Drones buzz ferociously, but lack a sting and are entirely harmless.

The Bee Sting. Most individuals who fear bees, do so because of their potent sting. When the bee stings, the sting, poison sac and several others parts of the bee's anatomy are torn from the bee's body. It soon dies, a fact that offers little relief to the individual who is stung. The action of the sting takes place almost instantaneously. The sting has barbs on it, and if it is not immediately removed, the reflex action of the muscles attached to the sting drive it deeper and deeper into the skin, thus permiting more time for the discharge of poison from the poison sac. The pain from the sting is augmented by the discharge of toxin.

Bee venom is complex, it contains:

1) Histamine. Moreover, the venom also causes more Histamine to be produced by the tissues of a person who is stung.

2) At least eight other components (fractions) which have been detected by chemical fractionating techniques. Two of theses are very active. Fraction F1, called melitin, contains 13 amino acids and is responsible for local pain and inflammation, lowering of blood pressure and a paralyzing effect on nerves. Fraction F2 contains 18 amino acids, plus two enzymes, hyaluronidase and phospholipase. This fraction supplements the action of melitin and in addition causes the destruction of red blood cells.

Different individuals are affected in different ways by bee stings. Some of the factors that make for this variation are the part of the anatomy that is stung, the amount of poison that has entered into the system and the natural immunity of the individual. The actual pain from the bee sting is of short duration and it is the after effects - the swelling and itching - that are the most disturbing. Some individuals are naturally immune and do not swell, while others are so badly affected by bee sting they may be confined to bed for a number of days. In some instances, the sting of a bee may result in red blotches on the skin, nausea, fainting and even death. The sting of a bee, as was previously mentioned, has barbs on it, and thus remains in the skin. At times, complications may result from the sting being embedded in the skin. For this reason, an effort should be made to remove the entire sting.

A. mellifera, the western honeybee or hivebee, also builds its nest of many combs in sheltered places and is found in the United States, Europe, Anatolia, and Africa. Colonies kept in hives yield an average of 23 kg (50 pounds) of honey.

Numerous geographic races have arisen as a result of natural selection. The brown or black German bees were imported from Europe to America by the early colonists. The Italian race was imported to Long Island in 1860; it is now the most common commercial variety, with Caucasians the second most popular. The so-called killer bees, of African origin and accidentally released in South America in the mid-1950s, are more aggressive and likely to sting intruders. They are also more inclined to swarm and are unsuitable for commercial beekeeping.

Unlike other bees, honeybees do not hibernate during cold weather. They last out the rigors of northern winters by feeding on stored supplies and sharing their body heat, clustering together in dense packs.

Socialization is most advanced in the Apidae. As new, young queens are about to emerge in an established hive, half of the colony leaves with the old queen and clusters on a nearby bush or tree while scout bees search for a new home. When the scouts appear to agree on a new location, the swarm departs. At the old nest, meanwhile, the first queen to emerge disposes of the other queens (by stinging them) before they have a chance to emerge. Within a few days, the virgin queen will fly to where drones assemble, and mate with 6 to 12 drones. The sperm from these drones is stored in a sac (spermatheca) and used during her egg-laying life of from two to five years or a maximum of nine.

Honeybees are subject to various diseases and parasites, including the bee mite, Acarapis woodi, which weakens bees and reduces their honeymaking and pollinating abilities. Legislation enacted in the United States in 1922 to regulate importation of honeybees was thought to have prevented this infestation, which has caused serious losses in other countries, but in 1984 the mite was found in New York, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and South Dakota. As a result, more than 150 million honeybees were destroyed by beekeepers to prevent further spread of the mite.

DRONES AND WORKERS

Drones develop by parthenogenesis from unfertilized eggs that the queen produces by withholding sperm from the eggs laid in large drone cells. Drones lack stings and the structures needed for pollen collection; in the autumn they are ejected by the colony to starve, unless the colony is queenless. New drones are produced in the spring for mating.

Both queens and workers are produced from fertilized eggs. Queen larvae are reared in special peanut-shaped cells and fed more of the pharyngeal gland secretions of the nurse bees (bee milk or royal jelly) than the worker larvae are. The precise mechanism for this caste differentiation is still uncertain. Although workers are similar in appearance and behavior to other female bees, they lack the structures for mating. When no queen is present to inhibit the development of their ovaries, however, workers eventually begin to lay eggs that develop into drones.

PHEROMONES

The integrity of the colony is maintained by chemical secretions, or PHEROMONES. Workers secrete pheromones from the so-called Nasanov gland at the tip of the abdomen when they cluster, enter a new nesting site, or mark a source of nectar or water. The colony scent is recognizable by bees of the same colony because of its unique combination of components derived from the colony's particular collections of nectar and pollen.

When queens fly to mate, a mandibular-gland pheromone attracts the drones. The same gland produces another pheromone, called queen substance, which workers lick from the queen's body and pass along as they exchange food with one another. The eaten pheromone inhibits the ovaries of workers; when the queen's secretion is inadequate, the colony produces queen cells to supersede her.

The mandibular glands of workers produce an alarm odor, which serves to alert the colony when it is disturbed. Workers also produce a sting odor, which is released at the site of the sting and serves to direct other bees to the sting area. Stingless bees bite leaves at intervals along their flight path to provide a scent trail of mandibular secretions.

DANCE LANGUAGE

The ability of honeybees to communicate direction and distance from the hive to nectar sources through dance "language" has received widespread attention. In 1973, Karl von FRISCH received a Nobel Prize for deciphering the language, which consists of two basic dances: a dance in a circle, for indicating sources without reference to specific distance or direction; and a tail-wagging dance in which the exact distance is indicated by a number of straight runs with abdominal wagging--the fewer runs per minute, the farther away the source. Wing vibrations produce sounds at the same rate as the tail wagging and are detected by organs in the legs of other bees. Researchers have developed a robot "bee" that can communicate with other bees in this way.

The various species of Apis, and races of A. mellifera, indicate a particular distance by a different dance tempo. This may lead the individuals in colonies with a mixture of races to misunderstand messages about the distance to a feeding site. Stingless bees communicate only by sounds.

The direction, or azimuth, to the food source is indicated by the angle of the wagging dance to the Sun. That is, bees use the Sun as a compass, orienting the dance angle to the plane of polarization of the sunlight. Even when the Sun is obscured by clouds, bees can detect its position from the light in brighter patches of the sky. Ultraviolet designs in flowers serve as nectar guides to blooms in areas as small as 4 sq m (43 sq ft2).

Honeybees also have a little-understood, built-in clock that appears to be synchronized with the store of nectar in flowers. Hence, honeybees making the rounds of flowers in search of nectar always seem to be at the right place at the right time.