Every year, a long-time SAGA parent and beekeeper visits our school to give a fascinating presentation about bees and beekeeping. Leonie Renate K. (4th grade) shares what she has learned in an article.

The Life of Honeybees

by Leonie Renate K. (4th grade)

The life of honeybees is very complex. There are many different roles in the hive. In this article, I will be telling you about baby bees, queen bees, various other roles as well as nectar/pollen. They also play an important role in the life of humans.

The roles of the honeybees in their hive are the drones (males), workers and guards (females), babies, and a queen. All the bees are equal in importance. The worker and guard bees feed the baby bees and protect the hive. The worker bees have pollen sacs on the backs of their legs. The drones only have one job: mate with the queen. Drones have very big eyes so you can tell them apart from the other bees. They also don’t have a stinger. Only the queen's genes are passed down to the baby bees. When a bee is a baby, its only job is to produce wax for the hive. This wax is used to make cones to store food in. Baby bees only produce wax because their wings don’t fully function until they are adults.

Queen bees live about 5-7 years and there is only one per hive. The main job of the queen is to lay eggs. The queen lays her eggs in a cone called the “drone cone”. The queens used to live longer, but now many more diseases and insects destroy bee hives like mites, which look like large ticks. Other predators of hives are ants and wax moths. A queen bee can sting multiple times in her life. In spring, the bees create a new hive.

Honeybees collect nectar/pollen from the flowers in spring. The first flower of the year the bees get pollen from is usually the dandelion. Nectar/pollen is used for food. Honeybees have two stomachs, one for digestion and the other for nectar/pollen. When a bee finds a good patch of flowers, they do a dance called the waggle dance. The waggle dance is a dance that signals other bees to come to that patch of flowers. Bees make honey out of nectar/pollen. They use honey for food in the winter. Flowers emit negative energy until pollinated by positively charged bees. Bees pollinate a lot of fruit like apples, oranges, cherries, peaches, and many more.

Honeybees play a vital role in our ecosystem. By pollinating flowers, they help us grow fruits and vegetables. The main things I talked about are baby bees, queen bees, and nectar/pollen. Thank you for reading this article.