The most skillful beekeepers must understand bee biology and adapt natural biology to their circumstances. Success in beekeeping requires an intimate knowledge of the biology of the honey bee, as well as management practices based on colony habits and bee behavior. This article on colony habits and behavior is culled from Wikipedia on Bee keeping.Bee colonies A colony of bees consists of three castes of bee: a Queen bee, which is normally the only breeding female in the colony; a large number of female worker bees, typically 30,00050,000 in number; a number of male drones, ranging from thousands in a strong hive in spring to very few during dearth or cold season.The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offsprings. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season, late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying 3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. This would be exceptional however; a prolific queen might peak at 2,000 eggs a day, but a more average queen might lay just 1,500 eggs per day. The queen is raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and metamorphosis.Mating of queensThe queen emerges from her cell after 15 days of development and she remains in the hive for 37 days before venturing out on a mating flight. Mating flight is otherwise known as nuptial flight. Her first orientation flight may only last a few seconds, just enough to mark the position of the hive. Subsequent mating flights may last from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, and she may mate with a number of male drones on each flight. Over several matings, possibly a dozen or more, the queen will receive and store enough sperm from a succession of drones to fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs. If she does not manage to leave the hive to matepossibly due to bad weather or being trapped within part of the hiveshe will remain infertile and become a drone layer, incapable of producing female worker bees, and the hive is doomed.Mating takes place at some distance from the hive and often several hundred feet up in the air; it is thought that this separates the strongest drones from the weaker ones - ensuring that only the fastest and strongest drones get to pass on their genes.Female worker beesAlmost all the bees in a hive are female worker bees. At the height of summer when activity in the hive is frantic and work goes on non-stop, the life of a worker bee may be as short as 6 weeks; in late autumn, when no brood is being raised and no nectar is being harvested, a young bee may live for 16 weeks. During its life, a worker bee performs different work functions in the hive which are largely dictated by the age of the bee.Male bees (drones)Drones are the largest bees in the hive (except for the queen), at almost twice the size of a worker bee. They do no work, do not forage for pollen or nectar and are only produced in order to mate with new queens and fertilize them on their mating flights. A bee colony will generally start to raise drones a few weeks before building queen cells in order to supersede a failing queen or in preparation for swarming. When queen raising for the season is over, the bees in colder climates will drive the drones out of the hive to die, biting and tearing at their legs and wings.Structure of a bee colonyA domesticated bee colony is normally housed in a rectangular hive body, within which eight to ten parallel frames house the vertical plates of honeycomb which contain the eggs, larvae, pupae and food for the colony. If one were to cut a vertical cross-section through the hive from side to side, the brood nest would appear as a roughly ovoid ball spanning 5-8 frames of comb. The two outside combs at each side of the hive tend to be exclusively used for long-term storage of honey and pollen.Within the central brood nest, a single frame of comb will typically have a central disk of eggs, larvae and sealed brood cells which may extend almost to the edges of the frame.Visit my blog http://farminginthecities.blogspot.com for more information on materials and equipment for starting a bee keeping Business.
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