Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bees and Flowers

We all know that bees love flowers, let's look at this special relationship.

Use a dictionary, your science textbook, or the internet to look up the word symbiosis.

1) What is the definition of symbiosis?

2) What are the main motivations for the bees to visit flowers? What do the bees want from the flowers?

3) What main benefits do the flowers get from the bees?

Check out this video on the marvels of bee anatomy:

from Silence of the Bees.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Sense

We humans rely on our five senses to interact with our world: Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. Think about how differently bees may use these senses for themselves.

1) What different senses do bees use throughout their lives?
Bees, like us, use all of their senses throughout their lives. Some senses, however, are far more developed than others.

2) What are some of the ways these senses are used?
The eyes of a honeybee are compound, meaning each eye is made of many tiny light sensors that each makes part of the image the bee sees. Bees are sensitive to different colors in the light spectrum as well as UV. If you look at a flower under UV light, you will see the colorful stripes and dots that vividly stand out and look like perfect landing strips. They can also see polarized light, so they are able to tell where the sun is even when the clouds are thick.

Smell is a highly developed sense for honeybees. Bees have receptors all over their bodies that detect odors. They can tell the difference in the fragrances of hundreds of species of flowers. Bees use their sense of smell extensively to communicate as well. They use pheromones, odors which are chemical signals. When a colony finds a new location for a hive, a lemony scent is released to let everyone know that this is now home. Guard bees let off pheromones to sound the alarm that there are intruders. After stinging, bees release a pheromone that smells like bananas and signals other bees nearby to attack as well. Queen bees have their own special set of pheromones that are also very important to the hive.

Bees can taste with receptors on the end of their long, tongue-like proboscis. They can differentiate between sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. This sense is used to test potential food sources.

A honeybee has three different organs to sense sound. One is located in the legs, used to hear different messages through the comb of the hive. They also have “ears” on their antenna, which let them hear specific frequencies.

Bees use touch to measure and form the wax comb of the hive, as well as all the other duties of the colony. Touch is also featured in the bee’s “waggle dance”, an important communication of direction to food sources.
 
Bees have another sense that they depend on, called magnetism. Magnetism is the ability to read our Earth’s magnetic field. This ability is found in lots of different animals that migrate and have homing abilities including whales, dolphins, and pigeons. Bees use this ability to navigate and also to construct the precise dimensions of the cells of the comb. The honeybee’s sense of magnetism is more sensitive than that any other animal known.

3) Which sense do you think bees rely on more than any other?
Like any creature, every sense used by bees is important to everyday life. As highly developed as smell and pheromones are in a bee’s world, this sense is probably the most dominant.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Sense

We humans rely on our five senses to interact with our world: Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. Think about how differently bees may use these senses for themselves.

1) What different senses do bees use throughout their lives?

2) What are some of the ways these senses are used?

3) Which sense do you think bees rely on more than any other?

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Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Jobs

1. The queen bee is a vital member of the colony. What does she do that is so important?

The queen bee is the mother of the colony. Her duty is to ensure the survival of the colony by laying viable eggs. A productive queen on a good day can lay up to 2,000 eggs!
She is cared for constantly by her attendant bees. These dedicated workers feed her, clean her, and see to her every need. She is the largest bee in the colony, and her body is long and slender compared to workers or drones. The queen can sting as many times as she needs to. Her stinger has no barbs; therefore she does not die after a single sting like a worker bee.

2. What is a drone bee’s sole purpose?

The sole purpose of the drone bee is to mate with a queen on her mating flight. They have no other duties in the hive. Drones are the only male members of the colony. Drone bees are the product of unfertilized eggs that the queen will lay specifically to become drones. Drones are more round and fat in size compared to the other bees in the colony. They have larger eyes and lack stingers.

3. What are three different worker bee jobs?

One type of worker bee has already been mentioned, the queen’s attendants. There are also nurse bees, guard bees, gathering bees, and many more. There are quite a few different roles that workers bees take on during their lifetime. Most of the jobs are assigned according to age. When a worker bee first climbs from her cell, she immediately begins cleaning duty. She must clean up her cell and other cells that need to be tidy. The queen bee is picky about which cells she will use to lay eggs. Therefore the cells need to be clean and neat.
Soon after, the worker will become a nurse bee. She tends to the eggs and larvae of the brood. It is only during this young nurse bee stage that workers are able to make royal jelly from a special gland on their head. All bee brood are fed this royal jelly for the first couple of days. Remember that only a larva destined to be a queen is fed exclusively on royal jelly.
When a worker gets a little older, she moves to the hive entrance to be a guard bee. It is then her duty to protect the hive from intruders. She will sting predators and threats to her hive. All worker bees’ stingers have barbs. Once they sting, the barbs stay in the ‘enemy’. When the worker pulls away, she leaves her stinger and part of her insides behind and will then soon die.
The oldest workers in the colony are on gathering duty. These bees forage for nectar and pollen and bring it back to the colony to be made into honey. These forager bees can travel up to two miles away from the hive in search of food sources, and make about ten of these trips per day.
Some other jobs for worker bees are mortuary bees (drag the dead out of the hive), builders (make the wax comb), and scout bees.

Here is a picture that shows a worker, queen, and drone for size and shape comparison:

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Jobs

1) The queen bee is a vital member of the colony. What does she do that is so important?

2) What is the sole purpose of a drone bee?

3) What are three different worker bee jobs?

Use your library or the links on this page to help you find your answers.