May 20th is World Bee Day.
Just the right moment to see what makes these little animals special.
Bees are usually dark yellow and dark brown striped, somewhat plush, have 6 legs and are between 11 and 18 millimeters in size.
They live in swarms of up to 100,000 bees, each ruled by a queen.
There is a very small hierarchy among bees!
The queen bee is the largest bee in the colony and is responsible for laying eggs and maintaining the colony's cohesion. Once she has fulfilled her task, laid her eggs, and allowed the colony to grow to its maximum size, she swarms with thousands of bees to nest in a new location. She leaves the old location, equipped with sufficient worker bees, honey, pollen, and a newly hatched queen. The new queen embarks on her nuptial flight and is mated by several drones before flying back to her colony, laying her eggs, and thus rebuilding the colony.
Worker bees make up the largest part of the bee colony, approximately 97%. They are the driving force of the swarm. Depending on their life stage, they are cleaner bees or nurse bees, responsible for honeycomb construction, brood care, protection of the hive, and gathering food. They are the engine of a bee colony, keeping everything running.
The male bees, the drones, make up a small portion of the colony and are solely responsible for mating with the queen. Afterward, they die or are expelled from the hive.
But how is it decided who becomes a queen, a worker and a drone?
It depends on whether the eggs are fertilized by the queen or not. Female bees hatch from fertilized eggs, and drones hatch from unfertilized eggs.
Whether a bee becomes a queen or spends its life as a busy worker depends entirely on the food the larvae feed on. True to the motto: you are what you eat.
Queen bees are fed royal jelly throughout their larval stage, while workers receive it only at the beginning and are then fed pollen and nectar.
Only the queen is sexually mature and can lay eggs. Workers have reduced sexual organs, but they have more developed collecting tools in the form of small "baskets" on their legs for collecting pollen and longer proboscises for collecting nectar.
