Page 15 - The Miracle of the Honeybee

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ees constitute a number of families, with some 20,000 species.
They possess the most astonishing knowledge of engineering
Band architecture in the animal kingdom, stand out from many
other creatures in terms of their social lives, and amaze scientists who
study their means of communication.
The bees dealt with in this book possess rather different properties
from other insect species. They live in colonies, building their nests in tree
trunks or similar closed areas. A bee colony consists of a queen, a few hun-
dred males, and from 10,000 to 80,000 workers. Of these three very differ-
ent-looking bees, two—the queen and the workers—are female.
There is one queen to each colony, and she is much larger in size than
the other bees. Her main task is to lay eggs. Reproduction can take place
only by means of the queen, and no other females are able to mate with the
drone males. In addition to laying eggs, the queen also secretes important
communicative substances that maintain the unity of the colony and the
working of the various systems inside it.
The drones are larger than the female workers, though they lack stings
and the necessary organs to collect food for themselves. Their only func-
tion is to fertilize the queen. The worker bees perform all such other tasks
that you might imagine, including making the waxen combs in the hive,
gathering food, producing royal jelly, regulating the temperature in the
hive, cleaning it of debris and defending it.
There is order in every phase of the life in the beehive. Every task, from
the care of the larvae to meeting the general needs of the nest, is per-
formed to the full. This can be seen more clearly when we detail the care
and altruistic behavior that the other bees display to their young.

HOW BEES CARE FOR THEIR YOUNG
The young of some creatures require greater care than the young of
others. In particular, creatures that reach adulthood via various stages,
such as the egg, larva and pupa of a moth or butterfly, require a different
form of care at each stage.

Adnan Oktar