Beekeeping 101: Taxonomy, Life Cycle, & Biology

Honey Bee Taxonomy

What are honey bees, and how do they fit into the world? Honey bees are a type of insect, a class of living creature that has three body parts, six legs, two antennae, and an exoskeleton made primarily of chitin.

Insects make up the largest class of living things on Earth, with over a million described species and many more species yet to be described. Insects can be found all over the globe, from blazing deserts to antarctic ice shelves.

Do insects live in the ocean?

No species of insects live in the oceans. That environmental niche is filled by a different group of related arthropods called crustaceans.

Honey Bees Are "Eusocial"

Honey bees are social insects. The most highly evolved social insects are called "eusocial," meaning they live in groups and divide labor among members that specialize in certain tasks. Honey bees, ants and wasps are all eusocial. Honey bees engage in complex communal behavior, including caring for their young, nest construction, common defense, and food foraging. In fact, bees are so reliant on one another that no individual bee can live for long on its own.

Bees are so reliant on one another that no individual bee can live for long on its own.

Biological Classification of Bees

It is useful to have an understanding of how scientists group honey bees into their taxonomic classifications. Here is how honey bees are classified:

Domain = Eukarya

Eukarya encompasses all living things with Eukaryotic cells, which includes plants and animals.

Kingdom = Animalia/Metazoa

This includes reptiles, birds, slugs, mammals, fish, and humans.

Phylum = Arthropoda

Arthropoda are invertebrates with exoskeleton, segmented body, and jointed legs. Examples include insects, crabs, scorpions, and lobsters.

Class = Insecta

More than one million described species are in this class. Insects have a three-part body, chitinous exoskeleton, six legs, compound eyes, and two antennae. Examples include mosquitoes, beetles, ants, bees, moths, crickets, weevils, grasshoppers, walking sticks, and water striders.

Order = Hymenoptera

This order includes sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants.

Family = Apidae

The apidae family consists of all bees, including bumble bees, honey bees, solitary bees, stingless bees, carpenter bees, and orchid bees.

Genus = Apis mellifera

Apis mellifera includes European and Western honey bees.

Life Cycle

The honey bee's life cycle can be broken down into eight stages:

1. An egg is laid.

2. The egg hatches.

3. The larva is fed.

4. The cell is sealed.

5. The larva spins a cocoon.

6. The larva transforms.

7. The adult bee emerges.

8. The new bee assumes its role.

You may be familiar with the lifecycle of a butterfly, which starts as an egg, grows into a caterpillar that crawls around eating a lot, then wraps itself in a cocoon and transforms into a butterfly. Well, honeybees go through all these stages too, but we don't really see any of them because they all happen inside the hive. The queen lays eggs in the comb cells that hatch into larvae. The larvae stay in the cell and are fed by nurse bees, and once a larva is ready for its transformation, the workers "cap" the cell, or put a lid on it, and the larva transforms, through an amazing process, into an adult bee. When the transformation is complete, the bee chews its way out of the cell and emerges as a fully-formed adult bee, although sometimes they come out a little early and aren't quite the right color yet. It's really fascinating. The different type of bees, worker, drone and the queen, all have their customized way of doing this, but the process is essentially the same.

The Eight Life Cycle Stages

1. An egg is laid.

In a normally functioning hive, a queen will lay one egg per cell in the brood chamber. Queens are able to choose whether to lay fertilized or unfertilized eggs. Due to the haploid/diploid nature of honey bee reproduction, unfertilized eggs result in male (drone) bees, while all fertilized eggs become female bees--either workers or virgin queens. Workers in the hive will produce a number of drone cells, slightly larger in diameter than worker cells, usually around the edges of brood frames. The queen "measures" the cell and most of the time lays the appropriate egg in the corresponding cell. If she gets it wrong, the workers will eat the "mistake." At her peak of egg production, she may lay up to 1,500 eggs per day!

Brood comb with one carefully laid egg in each cell

2. The egg hatches.

On average, the egg will hatch on the third day after it is laid, but that time can vary depending on temperature. The creature that emerges from the egg is a tiny, white, glistening, wormlike larva. The "egg shell," called a chorion, simply dissolves.

3. The larva is fed.

For the first 2 days of life, all female larvae are fed "royal jelly," a special food secreted from mandibular and hypopharyngeal glands located in the heads of nurse bees. Larvae that will become queens receive large amounts of royal jelly for their entire larval development period of 4.5 days. After the second day, worker larvae receive brood food. After 5.5 days of feeding, the worker larva has completed its larval development and begins to pupate. Drone larvae are fed a similar diet for 6 days before their larval development phase is complete.

4. The cell is sealed.

After feeding, a larva is ready to pupate, or transform into a bee. At this time, workers in the hive will cap the cell of the mature larva to protect it while it undergoes its transformation.

A comb of recently capped brood cells with some brood still uncapped

5. The larva spins a cocoon.

After its cell is sealed, the larva spins a cocoon around itself. It may not be apparent that honey bee larvae spin cocoons before they transform into pupae, because their cells are capped before the spinning begins and because the emerging pupae leave the cocoons behind.

6. The larva transforms.

Inside the sealed cell, wrapped in a cocoon, the smooth, wormlike larva undergoes an amazing transformation in which its body changes into an insect with three distinct body parts, six legs, four wings, and fully functional compound eyes.

A fully transformed drone chews its way out of its cell.

7. The adult bee emerges.

On the twenty-first day, a newly transformed worker bee will chew its way out of its cell and climb onto the comb surface. Drones emerge after about 24 days, while queens take only 16 days.

Even though queens are larger and in some ways more developed than workers or drones, they complete their transformation more quickly because of the richer diet they receive as larvae and because they are urgently needed in the colony.

8. The new bee assumes its role.

If the new bee is a queen, it will immediately seek out other competing queens and queen cells and attempt to kill them until only one remains. If the bee is a worker, it will begin to clean cells. If the bee is a drone, it will be fed by workers until it is able to feed itself and does very little else until it reaches full maturity, after about a week.

The Bee Body

Bees have three body sections:

· head

· thorax

· abdomen

One of the characteristics of the class Insecta to which honeybees belong is that they have three body sections. I mention this because recognizing differences in one or more of these three body sections is how you are able to distinguish one kind of bee from another. These three sections are called the head, the thorax and the abdomen. The head is pretty straightforward.

It has the bee's eyes, mouth, and brain, pretty much like a person's head, but bees have a few unique things as part of their heads that people just don't have. The thorax is the middle section, and I like to call it the motor section. This is where the bees' legs and wings are attached. That's how they get around. The third body section is called the abdomen. This is where most internal organs are housed, and in the queen's case, egg production happens here. Explore the interactive to learn a lot more about the parts that make up a bee and how these parts function.

Body Sections

One of the defining characteristics of the bee is its hairy body.

Bees Are Hairy

Bees have hair all over their bodies, even on their eyes. Bee hairs are branched, somewhat like the ribs or barbules of a feather, making them extremely good at capturing pollen. When bees land on flowers, their hairs allow them to carry that pollen to other flowers of the same species and pollinate them.

Honey bees also eat pollen. Having a passive system to collect pollen while foraging for nectar is a great way to complete two functions at once.

Bees have hair all over their bodies, even on their eyes.

The Bee Head

The head of a honey bee contains the brain, eyes, ocelli, antennae, and mouth parts, including the proboscis and several glands. Among these glands are the mandibular and hypopharyngeal glands, which in workers of a certain age produce royal and worker jelly. The mandibular glands in queens produce the pheromones called “queen substance” that keep the hive in order and allow the workers to identify her.

1. Antennae

Antennae are sensory organs on the head of the bee.

The antennae are covered with tiny hairs and pits that enable bees to sense odors, tastes, and environmental characteristics (like air movements and temperature) and to communicate with one another.

2. Mouth Parts

The mouth parts of a honey bee consist mainly of paired mandibles and a proboscis, or tongue. The honey bee uses these to groom itself and other bees, suck nectar from flowers, remove moisture from nectar to produce honey, and manipulate wax to form comb.

Worker bees in the house bee stage of life also use their mouths to form wax removed from their wax glands into honeycomb.

3. Proboscis

The Proboscis is the tongue of the bee, used like a straw to suck up fluids such as nectar, honey, or water.

4. Eyes

Honey bees have two compound eyes made up of thousands of smaller tubes called ommatidia. Each of the ommatidia projects an image through a lens, or facet, on the outside of the tube onto visual cells at the bottom of the tube. These images are thought to be combined in the bee's brain to create a single mosaic image rather than thousands of individual images.

Bees are attracted to motion and can see ultraviolet light, which many flowers exploit to their advantage by focusing bees' attention on their nectaries through the ultraviolet spectrum.

5. Ocelli

Ocelli are three little photoreceptors, or eyes, on top of a bee's head, each of which has a single lens ("Ocellus," the singular form, literally means "little eye."). While scientists are still trying to fully understand how ocelli function and how a bee uses the information that they provide, these photoreceptors do monitor light intensity and seem to be important for flight stability and orienting geographically.

Ocelli are three small photoreceptors on top of the bee's head.

The Bee Thorax

The middle section of a honey bee is called the thorax and serves as the anchor point for three pairs of legs and two pairs of wings. Much of the inside of the thorax is taken up by muscles used to power flight and ambulation.

1. Wings

The honey bee has four wings,though sometimes it's hard to tell it has more than two. The reason is that during flight the smaller hindwing on each side attaches to the larger forewing with wing hooks, called humili. This not only makes each pair of wings appear and act as one big wing, but it also means increased flight efficiency. When the bee lands, the wings unhook and can be folded back, allowing bees to fit into deep flowers and pack into hives more efficiently.

2. Legs

Bees use their legs for walking, landing, and clinging. Their legs also have many modifications that allow them to comb pollen off their bodies, carry pollen to the hive, clean their antennae, and move wax scales.

3. Claws

Bee claws are what we would call the feet of the bee. They are used for walking and clinging onto objects, such as flowers and combs in the hive.

Bees can flex their claws when they need to cling onto something and relax them when they need to walk on flat surfaces.

4. Pollen Combs

In bee anatomy, pollen combs are hairy sections on the inside of a bee's hind legs.

When a bee goes into a flower, its hairy body becomes covered with pollen. With its forelegs and midlegs, the bee scrapes off the pollen and transfers it to the pollen combs. The bee then rubs its hind legs together, raking the pollen off of each and onto the pollen press of the opposite leg.

5. Pollen Basket

The pollen basket is a broad, concave section on the outside of a honey bee worker's hind legs that serves as a relatively secure receptacle for pollen collected during foraging flights, allowing it to be brought back to the hive for later consumption.

The bee scrapes off pollen from all over its body with its forelegs, gradually moving it onto a special place on its hind legs called the pollen rake. The bee then compresses the pollen into dense nuggets using a joint called the pollen press, after which the pollen is stored in the pollen basket until it is removed and placed in cells in the brood nest of the hive.

6. Pollen Rake

The pollen rake is a rakelike structure around the pollen press on a bee's hind leg. The bee uses it to scrape pollen off of the opposite rear leg's pollen comb.

7. Pollen Press

The pollen press is a specially adapted joint on a bee's hind leg that the bee uses to compress pollen into a tight mass for more efficient storage during flight.

Using the press, the bee squeezes the pollen into dense nuggets and packs these into its pollen basket.

The Bee Abdomen

The abdomen of a honey bee is its hindmost section and houses most of the bee’s internal organs, such as scent and wax glands, the digestive system, reproductive organs, the heart, and the sting.

The abdomen is composed of overlapping sections of exoskeleton that can slide and expand to facilitate breathing and can change the shape of the bee for balance and aerodynamics, as well as stinging. Technically, the abdomen has nine sections, but from the outside there appear to be six.

A queen, whose abdomen is much larger than the abdomens of workers and drones.

1. Sting

The honey bee sting, commonly called the "stinger," is a complex device used by female honey bees to defend the nest (The scientific name for the sting is ovipositor.). The sting has several parts, including two extremely sharp barbed lancets, a venom sac, and glands containing alarm substance.

The sting is effective at embedding itself in flesh: Its two reciprocating lancets slide back and forth as a result of reflex muscular contraction caused by the ganglia. The barbs then work like a ratchet to thrust the lancets deeper, and the muscles continue to throb even after the sting is pulled out of the bee's body. Venom is injected through a hollow tube between the lancets. Since the barbs on the lancets are so effective at embedding in flesh, the entire stinging apparatus is ripped out of the worker bee's body, causing the cuticle to rupture and the bee to dehydrate and die shortly thereafter.

The stings of queen honey bees are not barbed nearly as much and can be used repeatedly without damaging the queen's body. They are used almost exclusively to kill rival queens. Since the ovipositor is adapted from the female sex organ, drones have none and cannot sting.

2. Spiracles

Spiracles are small openings on the sides of all insects, including bees, that allow air to enter the tracheae and ultimately feed oxygen directly to the tissues of the insects.

Bees don't have lungs. Instead, they move oxygen through their respiratory system by expanding and contracting their abdomens. Spiracles can be opened and closed at will through muscular contraction, either to prevent moisture loss in the body or to prevent water from entering the trachea.