top of page

To Bee or not to be.

Honey bees are considered superorganisms, wherein the whole colony is considered the biological unit rather than are the individual bees.

Most colonies consist of one queen, thousands of workers, and numerous drones. The queen's only responsibility within the colony is to lay eggs and she is the mother of all the workers present in the colony. The workers preform all hive maintenance tasks including: tending to the brood (eggs, larvae, and pupae), cleaning, foraging, and producing honey. These tasks are divided among the workers by age, a phenomenon called temporal or age-related polyethism.

Here you can see a worker sucking nectar with its proboscis.

Males of Apis cerana are called drones. Each colony produces significantly fewer drones than they do workers. Drones have large eyes that meet at the top of their head, no stinger, and their abdomen is thick and blunt at the end.

bottom of page