Bees4Kids - Importance of Bees
The aim of this section of our website is to help children, teachers and parents come to value bees. It builds on the "Bees in the Curriculum" Schools Pack, published in 1999, which is endorsed by the British Beekeepers Association and commended by many working teachers, Primary School Heads and School Science Co-ordinators.
What we can learn from bees
Studying bees adds significantly to the wider education of pupils. For example:-
- Bees are pollinators vital to our food chain. One third of the food we eat would not be available but for bees.
- Bees, like other insects, are part of a food chain.
- The social life of the honeybee colony provides a controversial start to thinking about the structure of societies.
- The tools which have evolved on the limbs and mouthparts of bees are neat examples of adaptation and engineering.
- The harvest from honeybees of honey, pollen, wax and propolis has nutritional, craft, manufacturing, and medical applications.
- Pollination by bees is important for genetic sustainability. Genes that have evolved in other animals are important to our future, too.
In the UK about 70 crops are dependent on, or benefit from, visits from bees. In addition, bees pollinate the flowers of many plants which become part of the feed of farm animals. The economic value of honey bees and bumble bees as pollinators of commercially grown insect pollinated crops in the UK has been estimated at over £200 million per year.
Bees are in danger of disappearing from our environment. Farming practices continue to disturb the natural habitats and forage of solitary and bumblebees at a rate which gives them little chance for re-establishment. The honeybee is under attack from the varroa mite and it is only the treatment and care provided by beekeepers that is keeping colonies alive. Most wild honeybee colonies have died out as a result of this disease.
These factors, coupled with a decline in the number of beekeepers in the UK, have prompted the production of the 'Bees in the Curriculum' Schools pack by the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA). Attitudes to bees must change and a new generation needs to be educated into the value of bees and the threats to their existence.
Different bee societies and habitats
Common facts about bees
All bees eat only pollen and nectar from flowers and plants. Almost 300 different
species of bee are known to live in the UK. No two species is able to inter-mate.
All bees go through 4 life stages:-
- Egg
- Larva or Grub
- Pupa or Chrysalis
- Imago or Adult
Bees have evolved from solitary hunting wasps which are carnivorous or meat eating animals. Bees have become herbivorous or vegetarian. In the UK, there are 3 types of bee, solitary bees, bumblebees and honeybees.
Solitary Bees
Most bees in the world are solitary bees. In the UK there are about 270 different species. Mated female bees live alone in a hole or burrow for only six to eight weeks while they lay up to about 8 eggs provisioning each in its own compartment. The burrow may be in well drained soil, soft brick mortar, in the ends of canes, or in tunnels specially made by beekeepers to create nest sites for particular species suited to pollinating specific crops. Some species congregate together in village-like communities so that a sandy slope open to the sun can have hundreds of holes with solitary bees coming and going. The bees have a short lifespan, living as adults for only about 6 to 8 weeks. The different species have evolved to exploit particular environmental niches and different ones can be seen at different times of the year. A Solitary bee spends most of its life as a larva or pupa developing in a burrow. Solitary bees have no sting because they do not store honey and their nest is only open for short intervals of time.
During her life, the female forages for pollen and nectar from flowers and makes a patty. This she inserts into the tunnel, lays an egg on it, seals off the tunnel, and then repeats the process to create a series of developing bees. Before she dies she caps the end of the tunnel to hide it from predators.
Despite being the last egg to be laid, the first bee to hatch is usually a male bee. However, all the bees in the tunnel awake at the same time of year and start burrowing their way to the outside through any bee or pupal remains if necessary. Male bees then wait for females to leave holes or repeatedly patrol a route at a height above ground particular to its own species. In this way males and females of the same species find each other to perpetuate its species.
Solitary bees tend to be specific to particular flowers so, as soon as that flower's season ends, the solitary bee dies as its food supply is cut off.
Bumblebees
These bees live together in social families or colonies and store food (honey and pollen) in wax pots in order to bridge periods of food shortage or bad weather. This is sufficient to last them only a few days, so they have evolved thick furry coats to enable them to forage in quite cold weather. When winter comes bumblebee colonies die, leaving young queens in hibernation ready to start new colonies next Spring.
There are 2 types of bumblebee:-
- BOMBUS BUMBLEBEES of which there are 9 different species in the UK.
Bombus Bumblebees have 3 castes, a female queen, partially developed female workers, and male drones. A typical colony can contain one queen, about 300 workers and, at the end of the season, a few drones. The size of colonies varies with the species and the weather in any particular year.
The colony starts afresh with a new queen each year who first has to find a suitable nest site. She then secretes beeswax and forms it into cups to store nectar and pollen. Like solitary bees she makes pollen patties on which she lays eggs, protecting them in cocoons. The individual bees are small at first but as more workers become available to help feed the colony, the size and prowess of workers increases, later workers benefiting by being better nourished. Later workers are able to lay drones but only the queen lays worker females as she is the only bee in the colony to mate.
In late Summer the queen lays eggs which develop into virgin queens which leave to mate with drones from other colonies. Mated queens survive by hibernating over winter behind gutter boards of houses, in garden sheds or by burrowing into a north facing soil bank. All other bees in a colony die out each winter.
- PSITHYRUS BUMBLEBEES (CUCKOO BEES)
In a similar way to cuckoo birds, psithyrus bumblebees lay their eggs in the nests of other bumblebees who raise them as if they were their own. Except during a brief mating period, males and females live separately. There are no worker bees as the foster bumblebees fulfill this role.
There are 6 different species of psithyrus bumblebees in the UK, with females that look similar to the particular bumblebee workers they use as foster parents. Mated female Cuckoo bumblebees hibernate to emerge the following Spring.
Honeybees
There is just one species of honeybee in the UK although there are several different races of this species which inter-mate. Like Bombus bumblebees, honeybees have 3 castes. A large colony in Summer comprises one female queen, up to 70,000 female workers with perhaps 300 male drones between May and August. Wild colonies rarely exceed 20,000 bees.
Honeybees live as a large family (colony) in a large cavity or man-made hive. The bees secrete wax and, left to their own devices, they will build parallel combs made up of hexagonal beeswax cells back-to-back on the 2 sides of a central sheet. These combs hang vertically. In this way they have evolved to live all year round, having sufficient storage capacity to carry them over the winter. In a hive, beekeepers provide the bees with this central sheet of beeswax attached to a wooden frame. This helps the bees to speed up the process of building comb and makes it possible for the beekeeper to remove combs and manage disease. Honeybees have evolved from wasps but unlike wasps which are carnivores, honeybees are herbivorous (vegetarian). Honeybees collect nectar pollen, water and propolis. Propolis is a resinous substance obtained from trees which has antiseptic properties.
A colony of bees makes a spherical nest (like an enlarged football). At its centre, the queen lays eggs which develop into workers. During late Spring and Summer she lays drone eggs further out from the worker eggs. Still further out from the centre workers store pollen mixed with honey and enzymes which form a paste called "bee bread". Outside this workers store nectar or honey.
To convert nectar into honey, bees mix enzymes with nectar and remove much of the water from it. The water removal is achieved by fanning at the entrance so as to drive air over the curing honey. When cured, the honey is capped with wax.
Honeybees maintain sterile conditions within the hive by coating all surfaces and brood cappings with propolis. They use honey as fuel in their muscles to give them the enegy to fly. They use pollen as a source of protein to build young bees to replace those that die every 6 to 8 weeks. The queen alone lays all the eggs in the colony.
A honeybee colony is held together as a social community by scents called pheromones which act to control each individual bee. In this way the colony is controlled by a form of consensus rather than a hierarchical structure within its society. So it is the colony that should be thought of as the organism rather than individual bees, as is apparent when it reproduces by means of swarm.
Amazing facts about about honeybees
In Summer, a typical hive of honeybees might contain:-
| 1 | queen |
| 250 | drones |
| 20,000 | female foragers |
| 40,000 | female house-bees |
| 5,000 to 7,000 | eggs |
| 7,000 to 11,000 | larvae being fed |
| 16,000 to 24,000 | larvae developing into adults in sealed cells |
In the UK winter, such a colony might reduce in size to about 20,000 bees before beginning to build up again at the end of February.
A worker larva is fed an average of 1300 meals a day.
A worker honeybee in summer lives only 6 to 8 weeks from the time she hatches as an adult bee. Before that, it takes just 3 weeks for her to develop from an egg. Most adult workers forage only 3 weeks for the pollen, nectar and water needed to feed the colony. They also forage for propolis, an antiseptic resinous substance obtained from some trees. After this their wings are worn out and they fail to return to the hive.
The queen is fed a high protein food produced by young workers which enables her to lay up to 2000 eggs a day. This represents about twice her own weight. All the worker bees living in a colony will have been laid by the queen of that colony.
The queen fertilizes most eggs as she lays them. She has control as to whether she fertilizes an egg or not. If she fertilizes the egg, the bee that develops will have 2 sets of chromosomes, one from the queen and one from a male of another colony; this develops into a female. If she does not fertilize the egg, it develops into a male, all his cells having just one set of the queen's chromosomes. This creates a very different society from the human on we know, both genetically and culturally.
The queen makes only one mating flight during her life and stores the sperm from up to 20 drones that she collects on that flight. Drones that mate with her die in the act. She can store the sperm for up to 5 years, a feat that has not been accomplished in the laboratory.
Bees eat honey primarily to fuel their wing muscles. They fly within a radius of up to 4 miles of their hive though few go that far. Their top speed is about 22mph (32 Km/h). Honey fuel consumption is approximately 7 million miles per gallon (2,25Km/litre) of honey. For flying, temperature regulation and wax production, a colony can consume 75Kg of honey per year.
To collect a pound of honey (half a kilo) a bee might have to fly a distance equivalent to twice round the world. This is likely to involve more than 10,000 flower visits on perhaps 500 foraging trips.
Bees eat pollen to produce bee milk, sometimes called royal jelly, which they feed to the queen continuously and to larvae for 3 days after they hatch from eggs. A mixture of honey and pollen (bee bread) is fed to worker and drone larvae for a further 5 days. At this point the larvae are ready to pupate so the bees cap them over with wax and propolis. The pollen is used by the bees as their protein food for building bee body parts. A colony can use 32Kg of pollen each year involving over 300.000 foraging trips. On each trip a bee could return with half a million grains of pollen.
To make 1 Kg of wax, it is estimated that a bee must consume 4 Kg of honey. They secrete wax scales from 4 pairs of glands under their abdomen, each wax scale weighing about 1 mg. It is estimated that about 80,000 wax scales are necessary to make a single honeycomb. Its hexagonal interlocking structure makes it one of the strongest light-weight structures known to engineers.
Until the advent of gas and electricity, bees were most important to man for the wax that they produce. Beeswax was prized for its sweet smelling fragrance which, if burnt with the correct size of wick, burned economically to give light with no smoke.
Bees maintain the brood nest all year round at a constant temperature of 33-34 deg C even though the outside temperature might vary from minus 30 degC to plus 35 degC. When hot, water is collected and evaporated to cool the hive by circulating air around the hive interior. When cold, they consume honey and vibrate their wing muscles without operating their wings to create heat within the hive. It has been calculated that 1000 bees can produce 7 watts heat energy in this way.
Did you know that...?
Ten years ago, it was estimated there were around 65 million hives worldwide producing nearly 1 million tonnes of honey each year. In the UK, there are currently between 20,000 and 30,000 beekeepers producing approximately 2,000 tonnes of honey each year.
Over the last 2 decades the varroa mite, a tiny crab-shaped parasite which sucks the blood of honeybee pupae and honeybees, has swept across the world. This kills a colony of european honeybees in 2 to 4 years and threatens to exterminate the species. The european honeybee has itself been transported to all the temperate counties of the world. Only by time-consuming management techniques can beekeepers help colonies survive. Few feral colonies remain in the UK unless they replenish themselves with swarms from beekeeper colonies. Because of the increased cost in beekeeper-time to maintain colonies, many beekeepers have stopped keeping bees.
Honey in its natural state can be in two physical states, clear (runny) or crystalline (set). When removed from the hive in late Summer, it is warm, runny and clear. Once extracted some honey will crystallize (or set) within days in the UK, and most naturally sets within weeks. There is no nutritional difference between clear and set honey.
Throughout the ages, bees have been used as weapons. Beehives were dropped or thrown at opposing soldiers. As recently as 1915 in Africa, the German army used bees to delay the advance of British troops.
For centuries, bees have been used to guard valuables. In India bandits used the large Asian honeybee Apis Dorsata to guard loot near mountain caves.
The largest recorded number of stings is 2,243 to a 30 year old man in Zimbabwe - he survived the ordeal.
The largest recorded honeycomb measured 2.25 m from end to end.
It was ancient practice to preserve the dead in honey.
Taking a bath in pure honey has been said to cure aches and "strong itches".
Rubbing honey with the consistency of sand on your friend's back in the shower or bath is said to be very therapeutic.
In the past, people thought that, dead bees mixed with honey and anointed on a bald head, made the hair grow back.
Honey has been used to preserve human corneas (parts of eyes) for transplants.
Because of its antiseptic properties, during the first world war honey was used to dress soldiers wounds. In the second world war it was used until penicillin became available. Honey is still claimed to be good for treating open sores and ulcers when used in a poultice.
Extract of propolis, applied in an ointment or lotion, is claimed to be effective against skin disorders.
Every marriage contract in ancient Egypt required the bridegroom to promise to supply his bride with honey throughout their marriage.
Mead, an alcoholic drink made with honey, when drunk on a wedding night is said to ensure a male child in approximately 9 months.
Credit
The original Bees4kids website was created by Raymond & Sylvia
Chamberlin High Wycombe Beekeepers Association.