Characteristics and living characteristics of bees

Honeybee is a typical social insect. It can be seen almost everywhere in the flowering season of plants. It is well known for its ability to collect flowers and make honey. It is also feared by people for its poisonous needle at the tail. However, in any way, honeybee is a beneficial insect. Let’s take a look at the Characteristics and living characteristics of bees.

1, Bees feed entirely on flowers

Honeybee is an insect that feeds on flowers (including pollen and nectar). When the external honey source is rich, the honeybee group will turn the collected nectar into honey and store it in the hive. In fact, the stored honey is the food that the honeybee group stores to prepare for the unexpected needs. For example, if the honeybee group can not go out of the hive to collect food in winter, it will feed on the stored honey. In the bee production, the beekeeper often uses white sugar and Bean meal is used as feed to feed bees.

2, Small collecting radius of worker bees

The bee’s collection radius is generally about 3 kilometers. When the honey is scarce, the bee colony will fly to about 5 kilometers to collect food, but this will greatly reduce the bee’s collection efficiency. In addition, before the honeybees go out to collect the honeybees, the investigating bees go out to investigate the honey source. After the investigating bees find the honey source, they inform the other worker bees in the form of “bee dance”. After that, a large number of worker bees go to the honey source to collect according to the direction indicated by the bee.

3, worker bees secrete wax to build hive

The honeycomb of bees is made of beeswax, which is completely different from horse bees (horse bees use a pulp-like material to build their nests). Beeswax is a fatty substance secreted by the beeswax glands of 13-18 days workers, The smallest unit of the entire honeycomb is a hexagonal nest house. The nest houses are arranged neatly to form a semi-circular nest, and the nests are arranged in parallel to form a semi-spherical honeycomb.

4, the life of worker bees is extremely short

The lifespan of bees (mainly referred to as worker bees) is extremely short. The life span of queen bees in the colony is generally 4 to 5 years, up to 8 years. The lifespan of male bees is about 3 months on average. After mating with the queen bee, it immediately died. The lifespan of the worker bees has a great relationship with the season. The worker bees in the wintering period can live up to 3 to 6 months. The other seasons are generally about 2 months.

5, Bees can only sting people once

Bees are feared by poisonous needles in their tails. In fact, bees can only sting people once in their lifetime. The reason is that the ends of bee poisonous needles have barbs. These barbs will catch the skin after stinging. When the bee stings, it will fly The poisonous needle will also pull out some of the internal organs, and the bees that have lost some internal organs will soon die. Therefore, the bees are usually not stingy, but if the hive is threatened, the colony will swarm and attack.