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Bees and Beekeeping
Beekeeping is the science of managing honey bees and promoting healthy hive conditions. Honey production involves extracting honey from honey comb and packaging the honey for human use.
2,104 Questions
When is the best time to start bee keeping?
The best time to start beekeeping is when the apple trees are in bloom in your locality. Don't buy bees late in the summer or fall unless you are prepared to give them special attention. Bee colonies started on new equipment have little chance of getting through winter if not started before June 15. The earlier the better. If a colony does not survive its first winter, try again. The second attempt frequently will be more successful.
What is another name for a bunch of bees?
A colony when in a hive, or a swarm when hanging in a cluster from a tree branch.
Can you extract nectar from dead bees?
What a strange question!
No - at least not for any useful purpose, though there might well be nectar within the stomach of a dead bee.
Is a honeybee a endothermic or ectothermic?
A honeybee is both. Like other insects, the honey bee is cold-blooded (exothermic). However, unlike other insects, the honey bee does not die off in the fall or hibernate, but is active all winter eating and metabolizing honey to keep warm. Individual honeybees are exothermic (maintaining body heat from outside sources), but a hive collectively is endothermic (maintains body heat from within).
Honey is not intrinsically bad for you.
It is a mixture of various sugars and other compounds; about 82% sugar.
It contains only trace amounts of vitamins, very little protein and no fat.
In moderation, it is not a bad thing.
It is only maligned because many people have too much sugar in their diet, already.
Yes. Almost every bee colony has a queen bee!
Signed by Tannermo
What do people who keep bees called?
Bee handler, honey harvester, Bee farmer it really just depends were you are and what they are being used for some are scientist trying to find medicine for people who are allergic
Do honeybees have complete or incomplete metamorphosis?
Complete. They start as eggs, progress to larva and then pupa.
How long can a bee survive away from its hive?
Normally a honey bee returns to its hive each night. In anything other than warm Summer temperatures it would be unlikely for an individual bee to survive until morning if it were outside overnight.
However, bees do survive quite well away from a hive when they are in a swarm that is looking for a new place to set up home. The swarm generates its own heat and this ensures that the bees are able to survive even if the temperature drops a bit or it rains. But even swarms try to pick a good warm day to make their move.
Why honey comb is in hexagonal prism?
honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal wax cells built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae and stores of honey and pollen.
Beekeepers may remove the entire honeycomb to harvest honey. Honey bees consume about 8.4 pounds of honey to secrete one pound of wax,[1] so it makes economic sense to return the wax to the hive after harvesting the honey, commonly called "pulling honey" or "robbing the bees" by beekeepers. The structure of the comb may be left basically intact when honey is extracted from it by uncapping and spinning in a centrifugal machine-the honey extractor. Fresh, new comb is sometimes sold and used intact as comb honey, especially if the honey is being spread on bread rather than used in cooking or to sweeten tea.
Broodcomb becomes dark over time, because of the cocoons embedded in the cells and the tracking of many feet, called travel stain by beekeepers when seen on frames of comb honey. Honeycomb in the "supers" that are not allowed to be used for brood (e.g. by the placement of a queen excluder) stays light coloured.
Numerous wasps, especially polistinae and vespinae, construct hexagonal prism packed combs made of paper instead of wax; and in some species (like Brachygastra mellifica), honey is stored in the nest, thus technically forming a paper honeycomb. However, the term "honeycomb" is not often used for such structures.
Honeycomb geometryThe bees begin to build the comb from the top of each section. When filled with honey, the bees seal the cells with wax.Close up of an abandoned Apis florea nest, Thailand. The hexagonal grid of wax cells on either side of the nest are slightly offset from each other. This increases the strength of the comb and reduces the amount of wax required to produce a robust structure.
The axes of honeycomb cells are always quasi-horizontal, and the non-angled rows of honeycomb cells are always horizontally (not vertically) aligned. Thus, each cell has two vertical walls, with "floors" and "ceilings" composed of two angled walls. The cells slope slightly upwards, between 9 and 14 degrees, towards the open ends.
There are two possible explanations for the reason that honeycomb is composed of hexagons, rather than any other shape. One, given by Jan Brożek, is that the hexagon tiles the plane with minimal surface area. Thus a hexagonal structure uses the least material to create a lattice of cells within a given volume. Another, given by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, is that the shape simply results from the process of individual bees putting cells together: somewhat analogous to the boundary shapes created in a field of soap bubbles. In support of this he notes that queen cells, which are constructed singly, are irregular and lumpy with no apparent attempt at efficiency.[2]
The closed ends of the honeycomb cells are also an example of geometric efficiency, albeit three-dimensional and little-noticed. The ends are trihedral (i.e., composed of three planes) sections of rhombic dodecahedra, with the dihedral angles of all adjacent surfaces measuring 120°, the angle that minimizes surface area for a given volume. (The angle formed by the edges at the pyramidal apex is approximately 109° 28' 16" (= 180° - arccos(1/3)).)
The three-dimensional geometry of a honeycomb cell.
The shape of the cells is such that two opposing honeycomb layers nest into each other, with each facet of the closed ends being shared by opposing cells.
Opposing layers of honeycomb cells fit together.
Honeycomb of the Giant honey bee Apis dorsata in a colony aggregation in Srirangapatnna near Bangalore
Individual cells do not, of course, show this geometric perfection: in a regular comb, there are deviations of a few percent from the "perfect" hexagonal shape. In transition zones between the larger cells of drone comb and the smaller cells of worker comb, or when the bees encounter obstacles, the shapes are often distorted.
In 1965, László Fejes Tóth discovered that the trihedral pyramidal shape (which is composed of three rhombi) used by the honeybee is not the theoretically optimal three-dimensional geometry. A cell end composed of two hexagons and two smaller rhombuses would actually be .035% (or approximately 1 part per 2850) more efficient. This difference is too minute to measure on an actual honeycomb, and irrelevant to the hive economy in terms of efficient use of wax, considering that wild comb varies considerably from any mathematical notion of "ideal" geometry
What is the name given to the bees that do not work?
Drones. Drones are male bees and account for about 1% of the bees in a honey bee colony. Their only purpose is to mate with a virgin queen.
Male bees use nectar for food.
Female bees use pollen for feeding the larvae, and nectar and pollen for own food.
What other acids to treat abee sting?
A bee sting should not be treated with anything acid since it would not help alleviate the pain or reaction.
How much money does the honey industry make a year?
With many small family-owned ( Mom and Pop ) producers, I imagine it would be almost impossible to answer your question with any degree of accuracy.
In addition, with the dramatic drop in bee populations in recent years under study in North America, one can readily conclude that overall honey production is decreasing significantly.
How do bees make honey from nectar?
They have a secrete enzyme in there mouth that when they they collect nectar and mix it with the enzyme it makes honey.
Can bees see the color yellow?
Yes they do see in ultraviolet color. I just saw it for the question "How do Honeybees see?" answer.:)
Bees do not have an infant stage. A bee goes through four stages: egg, larvae, pupae and adult. Bees stay inside the honeycomb until they are adults.
Why do bees and bears like honey?
i think they like honey beacuse they just like the taste of a sweet drink or drip of honey
Why is the honey comb not a bravais lattice?
If you take a look at one segment of the honeycomb e.g.
-<_>-
you can see that lattice points at -o< and >o- segments do not have the same "neighbours". It is important to notice that both the arrangement and orientation have to be the same at any point in Bravais lattice.
For more detail see Ashcroft - Solid State Physics (pg. 64).
Are hornets more dangerous than bees?
Hornets are much bigger and their sting is much more painful than bees. Hornets can also sting more than once because it doesn't detach form its body unlike bees. Hornets tend to be more agressive than bees, but they are much less aggresive in general than wasps.
