Honeybee

Scientific name: Apis mellifera

Country: Worldwide

Continent: Worldwide (originally Asia)

Diet: Nectar - nectarivore, pollen

Food & feeding: Herbivore

Habitats: Temperate forest and woodland, temperate grassland, northern coniferous forest, tropical dry forest, tropical rainforest

Conservation status: Not threatened

Relatives: Bumble bee, wasp, leaf cutting ant

Description:Honeybees have two pairs of wings and a brown and black striped body. Special hairs on the legs serve as baskets for the pollen collected from flowers. They have a painful sting which is used in defence of the nest.

Lifestyle: The male bees in a colony are known as drones. They are stout bees and lack a sting. Drones do not collect any food or pollen. They are simply required to mate with queens from other nests. If the colony starts to run low on food supplies then the drones are the first to be evicted.

Family & friends: Honeybees are social insects, with a marked division of labour between the various types of bees in the colony. A colony consists of a queen, the drones and the worker bees. Worker bees are sexually undeveloped females and the smallest bees in the colony. They have a lifespan of only 28-35 days, although those reared in September and October can survive the winter. There may be as many as 60,000 workers bees undertaking a variety of different tasks. Some are responsible for feeding the queen and her larvae, whilst others act as guards to the colony. Worker bees also do all the foraging and are capable of pollinating many species of flower and plant whilst on their nectar and pollen collecting journeys. Workers even help control hive temperature. During the summer months the hive temperature can sometimes get too warm so the worker bees beat their wings creating a current of air through the nest, which acts like a fan. In the winter, the worker bees huddle together in groups to keep warm. During this time, the colony will feed on their store of honey, providing them with energy to keep warm and helping them to survive temperatures as low as 40 degrees. Over the year, the honeybees will store an excessive amount of honey, which is why humans manage to harvest supplies without the bees suffering.

Keeping in touch: Communication is everything to honeybees because they live in such large, well organised communities. Much of the language of bees is in the form of pheromones - chemical signals released by one bee that can be detected at they float through the air by other bees, or are passed from one bee to another when they meet in the hive. Foraging worker bees also communicate by dancing on their return to the hive. The ‘Waggle Dance’ and the ‘Round Dance’ are used and indicate the distance and direction of a food source. The angle of the body while the worker is dancing tells the other workers the compass course that they need to navigate by in order to find the food source.

Growing up: The queen bees are selected by the workers who single out larvae when they are two days old and feed them a special diet. They then emerge from their cells after about 11 days and fly out with a handful of drones. On this flight they mate with drones from other nests and they receive several million sperm cells, which will last their entire life span in the nest of around two years. One queen can lay 1000- 3000 eggs every day.

The bee colony in Bug World was constructed in 1996. A queen bee and her workers were introduced and they immediately began collecting pollen from flowers outside. The honeybees at Bristol Zoo have the option to fly in and out as they please.