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 20 honey bees DHJanzen101035.jpg high resolution
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As mentioned earlier, honey bees (Apis mellifera) are quite strange bees in that they have very large complex colonies with a single queen and large numbers of sterile female worker bees. The bee in image DHJanzen101034.jpg will take its load of pollen (and nectar) back to the hive (colony) and provision one of these cells with it. The fertile female (queen bee) will lay an egg in the open wax cell and the larva develop there, generally to become another worker bee (or a potential future queen if fed different food and hormones). The males (coming from unfertilized eggs, and therefore their numbers controllable by the queen) will leave the colony in search of queen bees on their mating flights (the newly mated queen then returns to the nest, rather than going off to start a colony on her own, and fights it out with the resident queen for possession of the colony, which is made up of her sterile sisters). There are other species of bees that illustrate the natural history of the intermediate stages of the evolution of sociality between the (many) species of solitary bees and the very social Apis. |
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