HONEYBEE

in a broad sense, any insect of the tribe Apini (family Apidae, order Hymenoptera), which includes all bees that make honey; in a stricter sense, honeybee applies to any one of four members of the genus Apis. Usually the term is applied to one species, Apis mellifera, the domestic honeybee, sometimes known as the European domestic bee, or the western honeybee . The other Apis species are confined to Asia. A. florea, the little honeybee, occurs in central Asia, where it builds its nests in trees. A. dorsata, the giant honeybee, occurs in India, Indonesia, and central China; it sometimes builds combs nearly three metres (more than nine feet) in diameter. A. indica, the Eastern honeybee, is domesticated in parts of Asia. There are also a number of races, or subspecies, and strains of Apis species. A. mellifera is about 1.2 cm (about 1/2 inch) long, although size varies among the several strains of this species. The head and thorax, or midsection, are somewhat bristly and vary in colour according to the strain. Two large compound eyes and three simple eyes, or ocelli, are located on top of the head. Keen eyesight is complemented by two sensitive, odour-detecting antennae. All honeybees are social insects and live together in nests or hives. The honeybee is remarkable for the dancing movements it performs in the hive to communicate information to its fellow bees about the location, distance, size, and quality of a particular food source in the surrounding area. There are three castes, or classes, of honeybees: the workers, which are undeveloped females; queens, which are larger than the workers; and males, or drones, which are larger than the workers and are present only in early summer. The workers and queens have stings; the drones are stingless. Both queens and workers lay eggs, but only the queens' are fertilized with the drones' sperm and develop into females. Eggs of the workers develop into males. Queens are not hatched as queens; they become so when fed royal jelly, a substance produced by the salivary glands of the workers. Eggs hatch in three days into larvae that are known as grubs. All the grubs are fed royal jelly at first, but only the future queens are continued on the diet. When fully grown, the grubs transform into pupae. Queens emerge in 16 days, workers in three weeks, and drones several days after the workers. After emerging, the queens fight among themselves until only one remains in the hive. She then attacks the old queen, who leaves the nest with a swarm to form a new colony. A honeybee (Apis mellifera) pollinating a blue iris (Iris). Flecks of pollen grains The hive is a series of combs composed of two layers of six-sided cells made of wax produced within the workers' bodies. Food in the form of honey, plant nectar, and so-called bee bread, made from pollen, is stored in the cells. Honey, which the bees produce from the nectar of flowers, was virtually the only form of sugar readily available to humans until modern times. For this reason, honeybees have been domesticated by humans for centuries. The art of caring for and managing colonies of honeybees is known as beekeeping. Besides producing honey, honeybees play an important role in agriculture as pollinators of a wide variety of domesticated plants (see photograph). In the mid-1990s, commercial and wild populations of honeybees in the United States were severely depleted by two species of parasitic mites.