Apiculture — Bee-Keeping and the Honey Bee Colony

Apiculture is the practice of rearing honey bees, usually in man-made hives, for the commercial production of honey and other bee products.

A honey bee colony contains three distinct types of bee. The queen is the colony's single fertile female, responsible for laying essentially all its eggs. Workers are sterile females, and by far the most numerous members of the colony — they carry out almost every task the colony needs: foraging for nectar and pollen, building and maintaining the wax comb, feeding the developing larvae, and defending the hive. Drones are the colony's fertile males, whose sole role is to mate with a virgin queen during her nuptial (mating) flight; they take no part in foraging, comb-building or defence, and typically die soon after mating. So drones and workers differ sharply: drones exist purely to mate, while workers perform all the colony's day-to-day labour, and (unlike the fertile drones and queen) workers are themselves sterile.

Whether a female larva develops into a queen or a sterile worker is decided not by its genes but by its diet: a larva fed exclusively on the nutrient-rich secretion called royal jelly throughout its larval life develops into a fertile queen, whereas a larva fed royal jelly only briefly, and ordinary food afterward, develops into a sterile worker. The queen mates during a single nuptial flight, during which she receives and stores sperm from several drones inside a special internal organ, the spermatheca — sperm she then draws on for the rest of her life to fertilise the eggs she lays.

Apiculture yields several distinct products: honey, the concentrated, stored food bees make from nectar; beeswax, secreted by worker bees to build the comb, and used commercially in candles and cosmetics; propolis, a resinous substance bees gather from plant buds to seal and protect the hive, valued for its antimicrobial properties; and bee venom, used in some medicinal preparations. Beyond these direct products, honey bees also have enormous economic importance through pollination — as they move from flower to flower collecting nectar and pollen, they transfer pollen between flowers, and this pollination service substantially boosts the yield of many crops that depend on insect pollinators. …