Insects - Utah's Favorite : The Honeybee

Insects - Utah's Favorite: The Honeybee Utah's nickname is the Beehive State, and our official insect is the honeybee. We even had a baseball team called the Utah Buzz!

Come on, 4th graders! Explore this bee information to find out more about our helpful insect.

Just What Are Bees Anyway?

Some bees are solitary bees and some are social bees.

What is one obvious difference between a wasp and a bee?
About how many kinds of bees are there in the United States?
List 6 common bees in the United States.
About how many different kinds of bees are there worldwide?
What insect order do bees belong to?
Why are bees so hairy?
If you were being chased by a angry-looking male bee, how could you be assured that he would not sting you?

Encarta Online - Honeybee

A group of bees is called a colony. In the colony--in the hive--there are thousands of workers bees, a few hundred drones, and one queen bee. All worker bees are female. All drones are male. Drones have a VERY EASY existence. They have only one purpose in life, and they just hang around the hive with worker bees waiting on them hand and foot, waiting for their opportunity to fulfil their one purpose. The busy worker bees do all the work, and the phrase "busy as a bee" is very appropriate for them. Probably any honeybee that you see flying around is a worker bee because drones and the queen rarely leave the hive. If they do leave, they fly higher than workers, and we usually can't see them.

Describe the role of worker bees.
Describe the role of drones.
Describe the role of the queen.

Images of Insects - University of Colorado

A queen bee can lay up to 1500 eggs in one day. In her lifetime, she may lay more than a million eggs. She lays her eggs in special nursery cells of the honeycomb. Each little egg is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. It hatches into a larva in 3 days and comes out of the cell. Worker bees feed a substance called royal jelly to the larva. Royal jelly makes larva grow rapidly. Queen bee larva eat royal jelly for 6 straight days. Worker bee and drone bee larva are fed royal jelly for 3 days. They then are fed a watery mixture of honey and pollen. After the 6 days of eating, the larva are sealed back into the nursery cells where they make little cocoons and turn into pupa. In about 2 weeks the pupa turn into adult bees. They chew open their wax nursery cells and come out as adults.

How many sides are there in each cell of a honeycomb?
What is this geometric shape called?

Honey Bee Rap Sheet

The worker bees in a hive all have different jobs to perform. Some are nurses and take care of larva. Some are construction workers and build honeycomb cells. Some are janitors and keep the hive clean. Some are guards and protect the hive. Some are the food finders and gatherers; these are the bees that fly out to gather pollen to make honey for their hive. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see a close-up of a bee.

Pollen baskets! What are they made from?
Where are they located on the bee?
What is their purpose?
How do bees pollinate plants?

Honeycomb

Have you ever seen real honeycomb? Bees build it out of wax. Beekeepers provide wooden boxes for bees to build their hives in. Wild honeybees build hives in holes of hollow trees or even rock crevices. They make their hives by bonding together thousands of wax cells into honeycomb. The wax comes from special glands on the bees' abdomens. The bees scoop up flakes of wax from their abdomens and put it into their mouths. They chew on the wax until it becomes soft and moldable. Then they make the cells to form the honeycomb.

What is the purpose of honeycomb?
Why do bees build honeycomb to slant slightly downward toward the middle of the comb?

Bee Trivia

Fun bee facts. Bees can detect changes in air pressue. If air pressure drops suddenly, it usually means that it is going to rain. Bees then stay in their hives. Bees also do not fly around if the temperature is below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. When it is cold, they cluster in their hive to stay warm.

What is the number of trips needed for a group of bees to gather enough nectar (40% sugar) to make one M&Ms;'s plain chocolate candy?
How fast do bees' wings beat?
How many bees are in an average hive?

Gordon's Entomological Home Page

Did you know there are solitary, communal, semisocial, quasisocial, and eusocial bees?

Describe a difference between bees and wasps.
What is the difference between a solitary and a eusocial bee? Which kind of bee is a honeybee?

B-Eye

Have you ever wondered what we look like when viewed through compound insect eyes?

Bees and other insects with compound eyes see the world differently than we do. From the main page, choose 'Gallery'. From Gallery, scroll down and see what Albert Einstein would look like to a bee.

Bee Trivia

More fun bee facts. If a bee hive gets too warm in the summer time, bees flap their wings and act like mini air conditioners to keep their hive cool.

Why are honeybees reluctant to sting?
What is the average life span of a worker bee in summer?
What is the average life span of a queen bee?

The Amazing Bee Cam

A honeybee has a special sucking-type of mouth. It has a mouth part called a proboscis which is like a little drinking straw. It uses this to slurp up nectar from flowers. A bee has 2 stomachs. Some of the nectar goes into a bee's main stomach to digest and use for food and energy. The rest of the nectar goes into a special stomach called a honey stomach so that the bee can transport the nectar back to the hive. As it is flying back to the hive, the bee pumps the nectar back and forth from its honey stomach to remove some of the water from it. It also adds some special chemicals to the nectar inside the honey stomach. Once at the hive, the bee spits up this nectar liquid into the cells of the honeycomb. Other bees work on the liquid to remove even more of the water. When enough water has been removed, the liquid is sealed into the storage cell with more wax where it ages and becomes honey. To make just the amount of honey that would fill a thimble, a bee has to work about 10 hours a day for 6 days. It is hard work to make honey! Bees use the honey that they make for food during the cold months when nectar is scarce.

This site offers real time videos of bees in an observation hive in a laboratory. Visit the site and describe what you see. Can you see the queen? What is she doing? What are the worker bees doing? Do the cells appear to be full of honey, etc.

Famous Beekeepers

Beekeeping is called apiculture. Groups of hives together are called apiaries. A beekeeper is called an apiarist or apiculturist. Apiarists use specially constructed wooden boxes as hives. These boxes have rows of frames inside that slide in and out from the top. The bees build their honeycomb on the frames. Beekeepers lift the frames out to harvest the honey. If you spray your garden or the trees in your yard with pesticides to kill harmful insects, it can also kill useful insects like bees.

Choose 3 famous beekeepers and tell why they are famous.

Bee Trivia

Fun bee facts. Each hive can have only one queen bee. When a hive gets too large with too many bees in it, the queen bee instinctively lays some special eggs in long cells. These will hatch into new queen bees. The queen then sends out scouts to find a new place for a hive. When a suitable site is found, she leaves the old hive. When she leaves, she is followed by many of the worker bees. This big mass of flying bees is called a swarm. Meanwhile, the new queen bees are hatching out in the old hive. Since each hive can only have one queen, the strongest new queen bee kills the other queens. She then flies out of the hive and is followed by all of the drones whose job it is to mate with her. This is the only time that she will mate, and this one important flight lays the foundation for all the eggs that she will ever lay in her lifetime.

Which bee is not found in the hive in the winter?
All worker bees are the same gender. What is it?
What two things are contained in honeycomb cells?

Bees and Beekeeping

The honey that beekeepers get from their man-made hives is often flavored by the kinds of flowers that the bees gathered their pollen from. Honey can have the slight flavor of clover or even apple. The wax that the bees make is called beeswax and is used in gum, inks, lipsticks, and crayons.

People are not the only creatures that like honey! Do skunks get stung when they raid hives? Describe what happens to skunks.

Get This Bug Off Of Me!

Get the flyswatter.

What is the best thing to do if a bee comes near you and you are worried about being stung?

Bee Trivia

More fun bee information. A bee's stinger has tiny hooks or barbs on it. If you get stung, the bee's stinger gets hooked into your skin by the barbs. Because the stinger is stuck in your skin, when the bee tries to fly away, part of its body tears off. This causes the bee to die soon after it stings you. Bees only sting people or animals to protect themselves and their hive. If you are stung, the bee leaves a tiny drop of venom under your skin. This is what causes your skin to turn red and puffy.

Compare how much a queen bee has to eat each day to produce 2000 eggs to the human equivalent.

The State Symbols of Utah

Does every state have an "official" insect?

When did the honeybee become the official state insect?
What group lobbied (influenced the decision) to make the honeybee our official insect?

Bee Jokes

Knock. Knock.

How does a queen bee communicate with her workers?
What goes ZZZZZUB, ZZZZZUB?
What did the flower say to the bee?

Bibliographies help the end users "read more about it"...or in other words, find further information. They also give credit where credit is due. It is important to cite our resources!

Bibliography

Bailey, Jill. The Life Cycle of a Bee, Bookwright Press: New York, 1990.
Chinery, Michael. How Bees Make Honey, Benchmark Books: New York, 1997.
Coles, Joanna. The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive, Scholastic: New York, 1996.
Crewe, Sabrina. The Bee, Raintree Steck-Vaughn: Austin, Texas, 1997.
Fuhr, Ute. Bees, Scholastic: New York, 1997.
Gibbons, Gail. The Honey Makers, Morrow Junior Books: New York, 1997.
Julivert, Angels. The Fascinating World of Bees, Barrons:�New York, 1991.
Kelsey, Elin. Bees. Grolier: New York, 1985.
Miccuci, Charles. The Life and Times of the Honeybee, Ticknor and Fields Books for Young Readers: New York, 1995.
Rowan, James. Honeybees. Rourke: Vero Beach, Florida, 1993.

Author: LINDA MOSBACKER - Email linda.mosbacker@slc.k12.ut.us