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The World of Bees
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The Miraculous Life of Bees


A Bee's Family


- Every Bee in a Beehive Is Family.
Bees live in a group in the beehive. One queen bee, several thousand to ten thousand worker bees, and several hundred to thousands of male bees (called drones) live in the beehive. All worker bees are female, but only the queen bee can lay eggs. Surprisingly, only one queen bee is the mother of all worker bees and drones in a beehive. It means that all bees are blood relatives. This big family functions in a manner in which each bee plays its own role. For example, the queen bee lays eggs and worker bees provide the food.

There is only one queen bee is in a beehive. Of the remaining bees,90% of the bees are worker bees and 10% are drones. (April to June)

- A Mother with Many Children.
The job of the queen bee is to produce eggs. She goes out for copulation about once a week after emergence, and after returning to the beehive she lays 1500 to 2000 eggs every day. The life of a queen bee is about 4 years, 40 times longer than that of worker bees, which is only about 1 month, enough to fulfill their special duty. The weight of the queen bee is about 2 to 3 times that of worker bees.



- Lazy(?) Sons.
Drones are a little bigger than worker bees. Their job is to offer their spermatozoa to the queen bee. Except for going out for copulation with the queen bee, drones do not go out to get food. They just stay in the beehive idling their time away. When fall comes and obtaining honey and pollen becomes difficult, worker bees do not give food to drones any more and they are driven out of the beehive.



- Hard Working Daughters.
The job of worker bees is to clean, raise children, and collect food. For a while after emergence, they clean the beehive, raise larvae, and build up the beehive. After crushing pollen or carrying honey, they begin to go out of the beehive to procure provisions. The job of the worker bees constantly changes with changes in the structure of the beehive. Bees gather in a sphere shape around a queen bee. Right after emergence, larvae stay near the center of the beehive, but they are pushed toward the outside of the beehive as new larvae are born. That is why their jobs change from work inside the beehive to work outside.




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