Preview

How Honey Bees Do Their Job Essay Example

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
416 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
How Honey Bees Do Their Job Essay Example
How honey bees do their job

What are honeybees?
Bees are flying insects, and close relatives of the wasps and ants. They are found on every continent on earth, except for Antarctica because it is so cold there. Bees of all varieties live on nectar and pollen. Without bees, pollination would be difficult and time consuming. One-third of the human food supply depends on insect pollination. Bees have a long, straw-like tongue called a probiscus that allows them to drink the nectar from deep within blossoms.
Worker bees are the most familiar-looking member of the honeybee hive, as they make up 99% of each colony’s personality. Worker bees are females, they do most of the work around the hive. From birth to 45 days later, the worker bee is given different tasks to do during different stages of her life. Worker bees are responsible for everything from feeding the larvae (the baby bees) to even tending to the queen, and also cleaning the hive, to collecting the food, they also guard the colony, to building the honeycomb. The stinger of the worker bee is barbed, when she is forced to defend the hive her stinger will be stuck in the skin of the person she has stung. Honey is produced in one of the busiest most efficient factories in the world- a beehive. Honey bees are the most outgoing insects in the world. A colony contains one queen, 500 to 1,000 and about 30.000 to 60.000 workers.

The female honeybee will be unable to pull her stinger out, and she dies when she inevitably tears herself away from the stuck stinger, leaving it behind with venom sack still pumping venom into her victim.

Male bees are called drones. Their job is to mate with the queens from other hives, if they don’t mate they will die immediately afterwards. If they do mate they will live for 90 days. That is actually longer then the worker bee. These male bees are kept on standby during the summer for mating with a virgin queen. Because the drone has a barbed sex organ, mating is

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    -t-ray forces her to kneel on grits b/c he finds her in the orchard looking at the box of her mom’s things that she had buried (he thinks she’s out with a boy super late at night)…

    • 1369 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    chapter opens with a short description of he life of bees which is always has a…

    • 482 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Secret Life of Bees

    • 3403 Words
    • 14 Pages

    tone · Lily’s tone resembles the tone a child would effect when narrating a story in his or her diary, except with less self-loathing and more romantic language. Kidd relies on vivid imagery and poetic devices to help elevate the tone.…

    • 3403 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Killer Bees Research Paper

    • 1006 Words
    • 5 Pages

    After the killer bee stings its target it releases a chemical that smells like a ripe banana.…

    • 1006 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The reality of appearances can deceive people and trick them into thinking that the best people are the worst, and the worst people are the best. In mind with that; reality of people versus their appearances shows greatly throughout the story The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. When the reader deciphers the question of appearances versus realities, they can see the differences between the reality of the characters, and the way that the characters appearances are portrayed by the townspeople in Kidd's book.…

    • 601 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Zack Lincoln Tayler is a determined young man. Zack is a character from the novel,”The Secret Life Of Bees”. The book is dated back to the 1960’s when there was segregation among African Americans. Zack is a determined young man, he has a dream of becoming a lawyer and bringing justice among racist white people, he doesn't have a bias opinion about certain types of people. He is in high school for the whole span of the book, he became very hard and more determined near the end of the book because he was arrested for being with a group of friends and one of the boys threw a glass bottle at a group of white men, Zack and his friends didn't admit which one of them threw the bottle, so him and his friends were arrested and taken to jail. This inraged…

    • 655 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Colony Collapse Disorder

    • 1929 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Bees are weird animals. They know how to count to four based on a experiment done at the University of Queensland; they communicate with one another through dancing and pheromones; their fat bodies make them one of the least aerodynamic creatures that have ever left the ground; they can carry one hundred and twenty two times their body weight; and have personalities that have been characterized as anything from “thrill-seekers” to “pessimistic”1,2. The oddest thing about bees is their mysterious disappearances due to Colony Collapse Disorder, a condition where many adult bees never return to the hive.…

    • 1929 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Beehive Activity

    • 984 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The queen will lay fewer eggs now as the workers' activity begins to die down. This is when the beekeeper should medicate the bees and supplement their food with sugar syrup. As fall progresses, the bees will begin to huddle around the queen and there will bee little activity from them. You should use this time to reinforce the security of the hive to keep out rodents and predators that will make a meal out of a hibernating brood colony. November and December will call for little more than cursory inspections to make sure that everything is as it should…

    • 984 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Secrest Life of Bees

    • 441 Words
    • 2 Pages

    A mother influences a child’s growth, specifically a daughter, and helps them towards independence and maturity. “ The Secret Life of Bees” written by Sue Monk Kidd is a novel about a young teenage girl, who runs away from her unloving and bitter father to search for the secrets of her dead mothers past. This novel allowed the author to share the importance of the truth and accepting the realities. Kidd also explores forgiveness, racism and feminine power. The author demonstrates that a family can be found where you don’t expect it, perhaps not under your own roof, but in that mysterious place where you find love. Although Lily has suffered through the loss of her mother and father, she has gained a new family. This new family provides her a place where they help her accept and overcome the difficult times in her life with guidance as well as a place where she’s able to develop new relationships of friendship.…

    • 441 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Memories are the piece of our soul who make us who we are. I have chosen to explore the theme ‘Memories and the past can affect the future’. This theme is evident in the novels The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, Before You by Amber Hart and If I Stay by Gayle Forman. It is also apparent in the film The Time Traveller’s Wife directed by Robert Schwentke.…

    • 1151 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In two vastly different books, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, one theme remains of constant importance throughout both, that love, in its overwhelming consumption, has either the power to build or to destroy. Despite being set one hundred years apart, both Pip and Lilly experience this crippling emotion, but handle it in adverse ways.…

    • 812 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Buzz Off

    • 2478 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Each year since 2006, bees have gradually been disappearing from their hives or dying off. Bees have died off before in the past. This is called colony collapse disorder or CCD. In the past CCD was cause by mites or infections, but now this is caused because of the commercial agricultural farmers. Bees play a key part in pollination. When the crops are pollinated by the bees, they are capable of producing the fruits or vegetables the human population eats. Farmers primarily depend upon the bees to pollinate their crops. The honeybees were the most adaptable bees out there because they would pollinate almost any of the plants. Other bees were only attracted to specific plants or flowers.…

    • 2478 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Bee Colony Collapse

    • 1324 Words
    • 6 Pages

    In the past decade it has become common to hear the buzz about how the bees are disappearing. This may not seem like huge news at first, but when you take a look at all the important work bees do, this becomes a much heavier topic. Bees are the main pollinator in the United States and their disappearance would have grave effects on our food industry. Since this issue has been brought to the light, there have been many different options researched for possible solutions. These range from doing nothing at all to intervening and taking personal care of the hives. The future of America’s agriculture industry relies heavily on what happens to the bees.…

    • 1324 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Most people do not understand the multiple crises facing the bee population that continue to empty the hives. In his discussion of the honey bee collapse, Pritchard notes that “Almost a third of global farm output depends on animal pollination, largely by honey bees” (Par.1). Without the help and pollination of honey bees, foods that have been common for so long would eventually cease to exist. Even if these foods such as berries, onions, cabbage, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, and coffee to name a few, didn’t cease to exist, the prices of these products would eventually skyrocket due to the fact that they would be in high demand at this point. It is a known fact that honey bees are the only insects that help produce food for humans. Even a thirty percent colony collapse with honey bees would have a major impact on the lives of everyone, especially because shortages of food.…

    • 1215 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Killer Bees

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The bees reached an apparent climatic limit to their southern range in the middle of Argentina, and their range is expected to be similarly limited to the southern and coastal states in the United States. They have hybridized to some extent with resident wild and hive populations of European honeybees. However, many of the basic African honeybee traits remain, including rapid population growth, frequent swarming, minimal hoarding of honey, the ability to survive on sparse supplies of pollen and nectar, and a highly defensive nature.…

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays