THE HIVE WHO'S IN THE HIVE?

We think bees are fascinating creatures, and we love beekeeping. Judging from the number of questions we get asked about bees, beekeeping and honey, we know you’re just as interested, so each month we’ll take you behind the scenes for a closer look at what bees (and beekeepers) do.

There are three classes of bee in a bee hive – the queen, the workers and the drones.

There is only one queen in each hive. She is the boss of the hive, and the other bees are there for her service. She lays about 1,000 to 2,000 eggs a day or twice her own body weight.

The drones are the male bees. They exist simply to mate with the Queen. Their life involves only eating, sleeping and vying to be selected by the queen to mate. Only one drone in a hundred is selected and once the mating act is over the queen kills the drone by removing the sexual organ.

The female bees in the hive are the workers. During their life they progress through a range of jobs in the hive. They start out as hive nurses that clean and cap the cells that the Queen lays her eggs in, and feed the drones, Queen and the brood laid by the Queen. They progress to cleaning the hive, packing pollen and building honeycomb, before becoming honey ripeners, then hive guards that prevent bees from other colonies and pests such as wasps entering the hive. Next they act as scouts, hunting out nectar sources, before finally becoming foragers, when they and then graduate to go out into the field collecting nectar and pollen from trees and flowers.

Some people say that bees have developed the perfect society – we’re still deciding...

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