Honey Bees

Latin Name: Apis mellifera

Months of Activity: January - December

Unlike most insects, honey bees remain active throughout the winter with honey produced from the nectar of flowers providing plenty of food during the colder months. Honey bees are social insects and create elaborate nests, or hives, containing up to 20,000 individuals during the summer months.

When threatened, honey bees will swarm out and attack with their stingers to drive the enemy away, but generally as they forage around your garden, they are quite harmless and will only sting if they accidently become caught in clothing.

Appearance

• A honey bee worker is about 12mm long and is brown and amber in colour.
• A honey bee drone is about 12mm long and is brown and amber in colour.
• A honey bee queen can grow up to 20mm long and is brown and amber in colour.

Lifecycle

In the UK, honey bees are able to survive winter as a colony, and the queen begins egg laying in mid to late winter to prepare for spring. She is the only fertile female, and deposits all the eggs from which the other bees are produced.

Except a brief mating period when she may make several flights to mate with drones, or if she leaves in later life with a swarm to establish a new colony, the queen rarely leaves the hive after the larvae have become full grown bees.

The queen deposits each egg in a cell prepared by the worker bees. The egg hatches into a small larva which is fed by nurse bees (worker bees who maintain the interior of the colony). After about a week, the larva is sealed up in its cell by the nurse bees and begins the pupal stage. After another week, it will emerge an adult bee.

Pest Control

Effective control of the honey bee often involves the removal of the bee nest in the first instance, followed by an intensive program of integrated pest management. Over recent years, the honey bee has become a threatened species, and so pest control methods should only be carried out by a qualified pest control technician.

Latest News about Honey Bees

Dicing With Death
When pest controller Barrie Montgomery discovered he was allergic to wasps, there was no question he would be giving up the job he loves. 38-year-old Barrie Montgomery, who lives in Dundee and works all over Angus for Blairgowrie firm Graham Pest Co... [more]

Creating A Buzz
A pest control company has received buzzing praise for a new ecological initiative which encourages residents to take up beekeeping. The Suffolk Pest Control Company plans to relocate swarms of unwanted bees to newly constructed hives, which will be... [more]

Biological Insect Control Products
There are a number of products on the market that advertise they are biological insect controllers and are safe for the environment. It is important to understand how some of these products work, or don't work, as the case may be. Just because a prod... [more]

The Sad Strange Fate Of The Honey Bee
When was the problem identified? In the closing months of 2006, when thousands of American beehives were found to be almost entirely devoid of bees – victims of a mysterious malady known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). A study across 15 different... [more]

Europe Must Save Bees
With 76% of food production and 84% of plant species dependent on pollination by bees, Parliament's recently adopted resolution asks the Commission to do more to aid the beekeeping sector in the common agricultural policy (CAP) after 2013, by reviewi... [more]

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