I have recently taken in interest in beekeeping as a hobby. The links below have been a great resource for me!

www.gobeekeeping.com

Brushy Mountain Bee Farm 1-800-BEESWAX

The BeeMaster Beekeeping Course;

www.bee-commerce.com

Dadant and Sons

Beesource.com

Here are some interesting facts about bee biology:

Biology of the honey bee

Apis mellifera L.

What a scientific name for the honey bee. You will see the word honey bee spelled as two words and as a single word. But it is correct to spell it as two words like House fly, and bumble bee. Apis mellifera L. is the scientific name for the honey bee. The honey bee is an insect. Insects are classified as having
3 body parts (head, thorax and abdomen)
one pair of antennae
three pairs of legs
and usually one or two pairs of wings
As a member of the order Hymenoptera, the honey bee is related to wasps, and ants but is classified in the superfamily Apoidea. Apoidea have some interesting characteristic which separate them from other Hymenoptera such as yellow jackets which are sometimes mistaken for honey bees. These are:

(the following applies to all bees but I am using honey bee in the description below.)

Honey bee bodies are covered with body hairs
Honey bees have special body hairs for carrying pollen on their hind legs called pollen baskets.
Honey bees use pollen and nectar from plants as the sole source of food.
According to Theodore B. Mitchell who spent 38 years of his life studying bees "Bees are essential to our economy, being the chief pollinating agents of the flowering plants. They have a relation not only to agriculture, but to the conservation of wildlife and game management, and constitute an important element in the various ecologic factors that combine to form our environment. Thus the production of fruit crops such as apples, pears, melons, cucumbers, grapes, dewberries, huckleberries and strawberries, as well as cotton and various seed crops such as alfalfa, several clovers, vetch, onion, asparagus, buckwheat and celery, are dependent upon a sufficient population of bees, either the domesticated honey bee or some of our native, wild, solitary or social species."

Lets realize that there are over 700 species of native bees in the eastern United States alone and Dr. Dewey M. Caron, in his book Honey Bee Biology and Beekeeping, indicates that "perhaps 4,000 are found in America north of Mexico."

Apis mellifera L. is not a native bee. It was introduced by Europeans as this hemisphere was being settled and was called the "White man's fly" by the native Indians.

Most Apis mellifera L. in what is now the United States were called German black bees but that began to change with the introduction of Italian bees into the United States in the 1860's. Most of the honey bees seen on flowering plants today are golden banded bees and thus are commonly mistaken when yellow jackets invade fairgrounds, back yard picnics, and pop cans to get the sweet sugars and get blamed for the bad manners of the yellow jacket.

Honey bees do sting. Yellow jackets and hornets sting. But the poor honey bee dies as a result of its sting. If stung by a honey bee one will find a stinger with the poison sack still attached at the site of the sting. If stung by a Yellow jacket or hornet, you will find no stinger -- only a small reddish dot surrounded by a white welt that begins to swell and hurt--all stings hurt.

Honey bees are social insects. They benefit mankind by being crop pollinators, producers of honey, wax, propolis, and pollen.

Honey bees live in a colony of many individuals whose joint effort is required for survival. Within this colony of bees are both females and males. The males are called drones and are necessary for mating with the queen. They gather no nectar or pollen for the hive. They also have no stinger. There may be 300 to 500 of these in a strong hive. Each colony will have a queen. She is the mother of all the bees in the colony. The queen is a female as are her daughters the worker bee. Both the queen and workers have stingers but only the worker bee is usually associated with stinging. Most beekeepers have handled thousands of queen bees and have yet to be stung by one. The queen uses her stinger to kill rival queens.

Queens can lay unfertilized eggs or fertilized eggs. The drone comes from an unfertilized egg. Thus it does not have a father. This may seem strange to you but it does have a grandfather. The queen also lays fertilized eggs which result in all female offspring. Most often the fertilized eggs become worker bees but on occasion the bees may feed a fertilized egg with a special diet of royal jelly and produce a queen bee.

Queens leave the hive on several occasions during their life. One is to mate with drones (estimates are 12 to 20 drones) and the other is to swarm from the hive. A queen that does not mate becomes a drone layer and produces only drone bees. A colony with a drone layer will not last very long because the production of worker bees is required for a hive to gather nectar and pollen. Neither the queen or drones are equipped to collect nectar or pollen.

A colony of bees naturally swarm in the spring of the year. This is the way they have been able to increase the population of bee colonies over the millions of years they have existed.

Honey bees have developed a highly structured existence. The worker bee lives just a short period of time. The time reported in many text indicate a life span of only 40 days once they emerge from the cell. During those 40 days the worker bee will be engaged in a number of task within the colony and spend the last 20 days or so, gathering nectar, water, propolis, and pollen depending on the colonies needs. Honey bees emerging in the fall may live thru the winter into spring. Honey bees do not hibernate as bears do. Honey bees eat the stored honey, maintain a core temperature in the cluster so that some activity is going on (Queens reduce egg laying in the fall and stop and then begin laying eggs again in January), and bees feed and nurse the young brood that will maintain the colony into the spring and prepare the hive for the mass build-up that comes in the spring.

There are three distinct types of cells within a colony of bees. By the way, honey bees build a nest from wax secreted by their wax glands. This nest is build vertical to the ground and in nature built in cavities of trees and between walls of houses, barns or sheds. They do not build their nest in the ground.

Egg Larva Pupa Emerges

Queen 3 days 4-5 days 8 days 16 days

Worker 3 days 5-6 days 12-13 days 21 days

Drone 3 days 6-7 days 14 days 24 days

A queen can lay between 1000 to 2,500 eggs a day and a colony may have as many as 60,000 to 80,000 bees in it.