One year of honeybees

Spring and Summer

　The picture on the left shows a bee visiting pear flowers in the pear garden in It has pollen dumpling on its legs.

　In spring, when the nectar comes out, bees go outside to work. queen The bee gathers them up, and it lays a lot of eggs. Ho Spring to summer is the peak of nests. They grow more bees, collect nectar from flowers, and make honey honey.

At this time of year, the queen bee lays about 2,000 eggs a day at this time. It takes humans about 10 months to have a baby, and you can imagine how quickly bees lay eggs.

Also, spring is the swarming season for bees.
Swarming is an event in which, as the number of bees increases and its colony becomes more crowded, the queen bee travels with half of the worker bees to a new home.
The picture on the left, the yellow one in the middle, shows being divided the middle of dividing a colony.
It's a great thing for bees to spread their genes, but for beekeepers, it's a terrible thing to suddenly lose half of their bees from their hives.

　 To keep a beehive from dividing, some beekeepers move half the bees to a new hive when the worker of bees increases. And in order to prevent the birth of new queen bees, they will soon be removed from the special beehive called queen cell . where the queen bees will grow.
　By the way, many of the bees in current breeding have been improved to avoid swarming. Bees in Italy have the lowest rate of division.
However, it seems that Japanese bees tend to escape without pollinating.
At this time, drones go out every day to mate with the new queen. The drone's job is to chat up the queen bee. They carry the painful fate that they die instantly if they mate successfully and are driven out of their nests if they fail one after another.

　Bees are resistant to heat because they come from the tropics. And the bees can withstand up to about 50 degrees Celsius.
However, if it is too hot, the 　beewax from the nesting material will soften and cause theComb plate to fall off. Place the beehive in the shade as mụch as possible.
　Light illnesses that occur in nests from spring to the rainy, season often subside by rising temperatures in attack to summer. On the other hand, after summer, the wasps will completely annihilate the hive, Warriors have no rest.
In hot summer, bee lower the temperature inside the hive by ventilation with their wings or transpiration with water. The bees in the field outside the hive are ready to fetch whatever they need. Among them, some mainly gather nectar (this is the most), some mainly gather pollen, and some workers devote their lives only to collecting water.

Autumn and winter

　When the temperature drops when summer is over, the bees begin to pack for the winter. The number of egg-laying of queen bees gradually decreasing and the male bee is not needed any more, driven out of its nest.
While most insects leave their eggs to die in winter, the bee colonies live through the winter.
Bees don't go out to gather food when it's below 15 degrees Celsius. they will stay in the nest quietly, eating honey in the nest.

　 On the right is a photo of bees gathering and warming up in a winter birdhouse.

　On the right is a picture of bees gathering in a hive for warmth in winter. Bees use their wings to create heat. In winter, the worker bees gather and heat each other in their nests by using honey as fuel. So, the temperature in the nests is over 30 degrees even in winter.
The queen bee is in the center, and the workers are around. As the outer bees will get too cold, the inner and outer bees exchange their place regularly.
The worker bees that survive winter are called the winter bees, which live longer than the worker bees that live in spring or fall.
Because they can't grow larvae in winter, they have to survive until spring. Some colonies remain weak (the amount of honey accumulated through and the number of worker bees are both small)
and through winter and, there are cases where all of them die during winter.
During, we give honey water to bees so that they don't run out of energy.

The winter bees of the colony that survive the winter go extinct in the spring, after breeding the next generation of eggs the queen gave birth to.
The bees, not only the queen bees, but also the worker bees, spend the winter together, so they can be active as soon as it gets warm and in full bloom. It's rare; most insects die off except for queens and eggs.