Bee Hive: Exploring the Structure of a Honey Bee Home

You would have seen bees either coming into or out of flowers or you would have at least once in your life, had the experience of seeing a Beehive. Bees are excellent small living creatures that have an extraordinarily critical spot in our world. They promote the growth of plants through the process of pollination of plants and provide delicious honey. But, do you know where bees live? Their hive may be humanity's most ingenious place and buzzingly alive. In today's blog, we are going to take an inside tour of a honey bee home so as to understand the breathtaking structure inside it and how it makes survival for the bees possible. 

What is a Beehive?

A bee hive is a bee’s home name where honey bees reside. It is a place where they stay, make their honey, and even rear their baby—or young ones. Their home, or at least the name given to a group of bees, "hive," even sounds like the humming sound these little creatures can make, buzzing with action. Just as we have our houses to protect us from the elements and other entities, bees also need a safe and warm place to stay, and that is what a beehive offers.

A beehive can be wild, like in hollow trees, or it can be artificial. Relatively speaking, artificial bee hives can compare to the hive boxes that beekeepers put bees in to contain bees and ensure that bees are safe and happy.

The Parts of a Bee Hive

A honey bee home is a small city that covers various areas, with the bees having different jobs to do. Let's dive into the major parts of a honey bee home:

1. Entrance

Like the entrance of your house, the entrance to the beehive is just a small hole allowing entry and exit of bees. You will also find worker bees near the entrance; some just guard the entrance and do not allow access to the beehive by other bees that are not members of their hive. They also keep watch for any form of trouble that may arise, such as possible invasion of predators who might be interested in dropping by their hive.

This is similar to opening a window for fresh air. The entrance is necessary to assure the correct temperature and level of humidity within a honey bee home—both are very important to bees.

2. BeeHive body

The bee-hive body can basically be considered the main living space in the bee's environment. This is where bees live; they live in a house section in a house body where they build honeycomb – literally thousands of tiny, hexagonally-shaped rooms. Honeycomb serves several functions: 

Some have honey: Nectar is collected by the bees and stored in cells and then made into honey through a certain type of chemical reactions by bees. Now, this honey serves as food for them, especially during winter when there are no flowers from which they might collect nectar.

Some cells have ingested pollen: the pollen that the bees collect from the flowers, they provide to the larvae in these cells. This is a way of utilizing the pollen collected by the bees for food.

Some cells have queen eggs: Queen bee lays its egg in certain cells, and out from the egg, the new bees are formed.

3. Queen Chamber

The queen bee represents the most important bee in the honey bee home. Being able to lay eggs, most of the time, hence she keeps the number of bees in the beehive never going down. The queen's cell within the colony represents a significant place; she remains there for most of her time laying eggs. Worker bees attend to her, feed her, and protect her against any aggression to keep laying eggs.

The queen bee is much larger in size than the rest of the bees, and she indeed is a busy bee! She is able to lay hundreds and hundreds of eggs in her lifetime that will hatch into individual larvae and, with the passage of time, evolve into new bees.

4. The Brood Cells

In each of the brood cells is a baby bee. Every time a queen bee lays an egg, it goes into one of these cells. In literally no time, an egg hatches into a very small larva that looks like a white worm. The worker bees feed royal jelly to the larva; it is special food to make it grow.

As the larva develops, it cocoons into a pupa in which the cell is sealed by workers using wax. In the cell, it turns into a pupa first and then a young bee. In days, it tries to break out of the cell and take up the job of bees in the honey bee home.

5. Area for Honey Storage

The bees work in and around finding nectar from flowers and processing this into honey. It is stored at the upper section of the hive, sealed and protected at all costs until when the bees need to use the honey as food. They will fan the nectar with their wings and through that process, the liquid will thicken into sweet honey. When a cell is filled with honey, they seal it with wax to keep it fresh.

Obviously enough, during the winter, in the points of the countries, located in the poles, it gets cold and there is no presence of flowers. Contrary to it, at this time, bees consume the honey, which they have collected during the summer and spring months, to withstand this cold. So, at this time, it becomes necessary for them to make and store enough honey.

6. Area for Storing

Another principal diet of the bee is pollen, especially with the young ones undergoing development. Bees collect pollen from flowers and take this bar allowance back, where source bees store the pollen in cells near the breeding area. They dilute the pollen with nectar to create a special type of food, referred to as "bee bread," which they feed to the larvae to become strong and healthy.

Also Read: Animals and their Home

The Busy Bees Inside the Hive

Now that we have reviewed the components that make up the homestead of a bee, let's get to know the actual bees that live within it. In a colony, there are primarily three bee types and each has a very crucial role.

1. The Queen Bee

The queen bee is the female parent to the entire honey bee home. She is generally the largest bee and performs one of the most important tasks among the bees—egg-laying. She lays all the eggs that develop into the new bees, thus ensuring the honey bee home remains at the ideal levels of workers to enable the hive to function.

The queen bee manufactures some extraordinary chemicals referred to as pheromones used to regulate the other honeybees' activities inside the beehive. This shows that she is the one responsible for controlling all the activities that happen within the colony, intervention of the other bees occurs in working for her.

2. Worker Bees

Worker Bees are normally the smallest bees but do the major work. Female worker bees have a lot to do. Here are some of their whole-life tasks:

Foraging: This is the activity of worker bees collecting nectar, pollen, water, and a sticky substance from plants out of the hive. 

Building the Hive: Wax-producing cycles down the abdomen of the worker bees and is used for the production of honeycombs.

Feeding the Larvae: The worker bees feed the larvae royal jelly, bee bread, and honey.

Guarding the Hive: Some worker bees stand at the entrance and offer sentry duty and protect the honey bee home from all unwanted visitors.

Cleaning: Worker bees are charged with cleaning the hive tidy and ensuring everything is in its place. Worker bees are small, very busy, and hardworking during life; their lives are short, which normally last about six weeks during summer.

3. The Drones

The worker bees do everything in the honey bee home like cleaning, gathering food, feeding the honeycomb chambers - as well as defending the hive. They do the jobs that they are ordered to do; they are also divided into subcategories according to what types of bees they are.  The Drones are the male bees in the beehive; the only work they have to do is to mate with a queen in a different hive. They are large in size, compared to the worker bees, they do not have a sting like the workers, and are not involved in any cleaning or food gathering.

That's just basic: in summer, drones are nested within the hive, but in winter, drones are mostly driven out of the hives, since the bees have to save the food and resources for survival.

Why Are Beehives Important?

Beehives are important to us though not only to bees. Bees help in the pollination of most plants, thereby making them bear the fruits, vegetables, and nuts that man eats. Most of our food supply would stay put in trickles were the bees to disappear from the face of the earth, or most plants and flowers would not be there during pollination.

By living in hazes, bees get to work in big numbers. In so doing, they do the work of producing honey other than pollinating the plants in a much efficient way. Coordination by hive structures protects bees and organizes them to do important work.

How Beekeepers Help

The beekeepers work with the bees and take care of them. They provide the bees with safe accommodation, ensuring their health and comfort. They take away the harvest of honey made by the bees, but utmost care is always taken to reserve enough food for the bees during the winter.

Beekeepers always check on the hives to ensure the health of bees and protect them from predators and diseases. They also sensitize on how bees are important and on ways everyone can help save their amazing creatures.

How Can You Help Bees?

While you too may not have a beehive in your backyard, you can certainly do your bit in helping the bees out in the following ways:

Plant flowers: Bees love flowers. Plant flowers in your garden or in pots so that there is a place for bees to collect their nectar and pollen. The use of pesticides or insecticides in gardens should be minimized. 

Bees need water: Sometimes, bees just need a little rest, and you can provide this by putting a few floats in a water container.

Shop local: Work with the beekeepers locally and buy honey from the beekeepers for them to survive and build a relationship that will help keep the population of bees in their territory.

Fun Facts of Bees and Hives

As we wrap up our tour into the honey bees' house here are some fun facts about the bees and their homes.

Bees have five eyes. Each bee has two large compound eyes and three small ocelli, or simple eyes, on top of its head.

A bee can fly around 15 miles per hour—pretty darn fast for such a small insect!

Honey never spoils—archeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs that are over 3,000 years old and still safe to eat.

A single bee makes approximately 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime—depending on bees individually is tedious and time-consuming, so it might come to the reason that much of the honey humanity enjoys couldn't be produced without many bees working in unison.

Conclusion 

It is, of course, mind-boggling that a beehive with thousands of strong bees encapsulates the bees that live and work in a coordinated way. Bees and other pollinators have an influence on 35 percent of the world's total crop production. They pollinate 87 out of 115 main food crops across the globe. Pollination plays a crucial role in 90 percent of wildflower plants and 75 percent of edible plantations. Bee experts at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations say that bees in their Honey Bee home are essential for a third of the world's food production. Animals and insects help plants, including many food crops, to reproduce by picking up pollen from flowers and spreading it around.

FAQs

1. What is the structure of a Beehive?

The standard nest architecture for all honeybees is similar: honey is stored in the upper part of the comb; beneath it are rows of pollen-storage cells, worker-brood cells, and drone-brood cells, in that order. The peanut-shaped queen cells are normally built at the lower edge of the comb. Most beehives consist of 5-10 distinct parts that provide structure for the colony to store food and tend brood, as well as provide protection for the colony from the elements and from predators. If a beehive is a house for bees then each part of the hive has a function like the parts of a human house.

2. What is the structure of a Honey bee for kids?

Honey bee Anatomy (scientific name, Apis mellifera)- Honey bees have two antennae, two compound eyes, two pairs of wings (4), three pairs of legs (6), a nectar pouch or honey sac, and a segmented abdomen. At the end of the abdomen is the stinger with a barb, which anchors the stinger in the victim's body.

Enjoy learning about Bee homes and more. Kindly share this blog with your friends and family to spread the word about Bees and its contribution to the environment!

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