Honey Bee (Apis mellifera)
The Honey bee is unique by the fact that it is probably the only insect species to have become a true domestic animal. Beehives were common in Egypt some 5,000 years ago. The nest of the Honey bee has the reputation of being the most perfectly organised state known among insects. It is ruled by a single queen, the mother of all the occupants of the hive.

A typical honey bee colony is made up of one queen, thousands of workers, and a few hundred drones. A colony of honey bees can number up to 80,000, all the residents having defined duties.

The queen lays the eggs. The workers, which live only a short time, perform different tasks. In the first phase of their life they keep the nest clean, and subsequently feed and help rear the young grubs.

They are also kept busy building the regular hexagonal cells of the comb from wax produced by their wax glands; they also concentrate nectar and fill the cells with pollen. When they have completed these tasks they act for a short time as guards. The last phase of their life is spent collecting pollen and nectar.

The hive only contains males (drones) in spring and early summer, their sole function being to fertilise the new queens. The queen measures 16-20mm. The workers 12-15mm and the males 14-18mm. The honey bees body is golden brown and black in colour with pale orange/yellow rings on the abdomen.

Life cycle:
Bees develop from the eggs laid by the queen . During the mating the drone places semen inside the queen's body. The queen stores the sperm in a sac in her abdomen. If the queen releases sperm onto a egg, the egg hatches into a worker. If she does not release sperm it develops into a drone. Honey bee eggs are pearly white and about as big as the head of a pin.

How Bees Develop
The honey bee begins life as an egg. The queen lays eggs, but only the "worker" eggs are fertilised with the drones’ sperm and develop into females. Queens are not hatched as queens; they become so when fed royal jelly, a substance produced by the hypopharyngeal glands of the workers.

Eggs hatch in 72 hours into larvae that are known as grubs. All the grubs are fed royal jelly at first, but only the future queens are continued on the diet. When fully grown, the grubs transform into pupae. These pupae develop through a process called metamorphosis into fully grown workers (emerge in 21 days), drones (emerge several days after the worker bees) and queens (emerge within 16 days). As there is only one queen for each hive, about a week before the new queen is hatched, the old queen is prepared for leaving the hive. Just before the new queen emerges, the old queen leaves taking with her at least half the workers and drones.

How do Bees Communicate
Bees cannot talk to each other so they communicate through dances, vibrations, and body chemical signals. The scout bees have the task of finding new pollen, nectar and water sources, once they have sourced these they return to the hive and perform either a round or waggle dance across the honeycomb. To indicate distance exactly, the scout bee uses an audible code of buzzes on a 200 cycle per second note with a pulse rate of 35 to a second.

The Round dance is performed when the food source is within a hundred metres of the hive. Wings vibrate swiftly as the bee dances in a circle and then turns and runs the other way. The wagtail dance is performed if the source is further away.

The wagtail looks roughly like the figure 8 with a straight centre section. When the food is in the direction of the sun the scout performs the wagtail portions of the dance while moving straight up on the comb. When the food is directly away from the sun the wagtail portion is performed as she dances straight down. If the sun is due north of the hive, east and west are indicated by the scout’s dancing to the right or left respectively. The direction danced during the day changes as the sun moves across the sky but performing the wagtail portion of the dance straight up always means fly in the current direction of the sun, wherever it may be.

Swarming
Swarming is the natural method used by honeybees to survive or multiply. When a swarm issues from a colony it contains the old queen and about 50% of the adult honeybees. A swarm is often seen clustered in a tree or a shrub and within a few hours scout honeybees have found a new home for them to settle. The honeybees then produce new honeycombs to store food and provide cells for the queen to recommence laying eggs. In the meantime, the original hive houses a new queen ready to take over after the swarm has left.

Reason for control:
Honey bees are a very beneficial insect in our environment and only occasionally does their presence constitute a pest problem. Most professional pest control companies are reluctant to use pesticides on bees nests unless absolutely necessary. Occasionally however there are no alternatives; i.e. where their presence may cause a risk to health and welfare.) Swarming bees may also cause a serious health risk when present in large numbers. Where honey bees do become a problem our advice is consult a beekeeper first to see if they can offer an alternative to destruction.

Control measures:
Honey bees are very susceptible to insecticides, where individual bees are a problem, an aerosol insecticide should prove sufficient for controlling the odd nuisance bee. Dealing with more serious problems like nests, swarms etc, should be left to the experts. Because honey bees survive winter conditions active nests will continue to expand from one year to the next. Their presence in places like chimney stacks, roof voids and cavities can cause many problems, such as blockages in flues, and severe staining to the fabric and plasterwork of buildings.

Where nests are treated with insecticides, it is important that as much of the nest is removed as possible following the treatment, and measures should be taken to prevent any non-target foraging honey bees from entering the nesting site and taking away any contaminated honey. Failure to do this may lead to contamination of honey destined for food use, serious bee kills, and destruction of hives.

Honey Bee Social Structure
There are three castes of bees in each colony, a queen, drones and workers. Each of the castes are interdependent and rely on each other for survival.

The Worker
The workers are female bees who do not normally lay eggs. They are 13-17mm long and they live for about six weeks (during the peak of the season) and perform many tasks throughout their lives. Their first task is that of a hive nurse who cleans and caps cells, feed the drones, queen and brood. Later they store and receive nectar from other workers, pack pollen, build honeycomb and clean the hive. Later in life they become honey ripeners and hive guards, preventing foreign insects from entering the hive.

Finally they become foragers. Foragers search for and collect nectar, pollen and water for the colony. They have a long mouthpiece called a proboscis, for sipping the nectar and water that nourish the bees in the hive and provide us with honey.

The Queen
The queen is the largest bee and each colony has just one, whose sole purpose is to lay eggs – hence her large abdomen. The queen bee has one mating period in her life, during this time she leaves the hive and mates with 7 to 10 drones usually from other colonies before returning to the hive, so her wings are smaller than the worker’s. After a few days the queen returns to the hive, storing the sperm in her abdomen. She then begins to lay her eggs. During this time she is cleaned and fed by the worker bees so she can spend all her time laying eggs.

The queen lives for about two to four years, however beekeepers like to replace them after a year as they tend to produce more eggs in the first year.

The Drone
The drones are stingless male bees that are shorter than the queen and twice as heavy as the worker, they also have larger eyes and antennae than the females. These help it succeed in its only task – locating and mating with the queen during flight.

The drones die instantly after they have mated with a queen. Usually there are only a few hundred drones in a hive and they may be evicted at the beginning of winter when breeding ceases.