High-definition detail pictures of bees, body structures and structures of bees
Bees (insects)
Bees (Bee/Honey bee) belong to the order Hymenoptera, the family Beeidae. The body is 8–20 mm long, yellowish-brown or black-brown, with dense hairs. The head is almost as wide as the chest. The antennae are knee-shaped, the compound eyes are oval, hairy, the mouthparts are chewy and suctioning, and the hind feet are powder-carrying feet. Two pairs of membranous wings; the forewings are large, the hindwings are small, and the front and back wings are interlocked with a wing hook. The abdomen is nearly oval, with less body hair than on the chest, and a chelated needle at the end of the abdomen. Throughout life, it passes through four worm states: egg, larva, pupae and adult. Bees live in groups, and there are three types of bees: queen bees, worker bees and male bees (Drones). Bees are one of the insect groups that are beneficial to humans, because bees work non-stop to obtain food, collecting honey during the day and making honey at night, while completing pollination tasks for fruit trees, and an important medium for pollination of crops.
Bees collect nectar
1. Morphological characteristics of bees
Bee (Bee/Honey bee) is a flying social insect belonging to the order Hymenoptera, The Bee Family.
Bee detailed pictures, including bee mouthparts, antennae, wings, etc
The body is 8-20 mm long, yellowish brown or black-brown, with dense hairs; the head and chest are almost the same width; the waist is slenderer than the chest and abdomen; the antennae are knee-shaped, the compound eyes are oval, the mouthparts are chewed and sucked, and the hind feet are powder-carrying feet; two pairs of membranous wings, the forewings are large, the hindwings are small, and the front and back wings are hooked; the abdomen is nearly oval, the body hair is less than the chest, and there are chelating needles at the end of the abdomen. They are called resource insects.
The basic characteristics of bees are to go through four processes of egg, larvae, pupae and adult insects throughout their lives. In general, males appear earlier than females, have a short lifespan, and do not undertake the tasks of nesting, storing bee food and raising offspring. Female bees nest, collect pollen and nectar, and store them in the nest chamber, and live longer than males.
Bees fly at a speed of 20-40 km/h, within 1 km in height, and have an effective range of activity within 2.5 km from the nest. All bees feed on pollen and nectar, collecting nectar is a very hard job, bees interview 1100-1446 flowers to get 1 honey sac nectar, during the honey flow period 1 bee collected an average of 10 times a day, each honey load averaged half of its body weight, a lifetime can only provide 0.6 grams of honey for humans. When the nectar is sucked into the honey sac by the bees, it is mixed with the secretion of the upper jaw glands - invertase, and the transformation of sucrose begins from here, evaporating the water by repeatedly brewing the honey juice and constantly fanning, accelerating the transformation and concentration until the honey is fully mature. Depending on the species, worker bees generally range from 12 to more than 50,000, collect nectar and pollen, and if they are bees, they also transmit nectar and pollen to specific places, which are obtained by dancing a special and strict dance. Their duties include making honey, making the hive chamber of the waxy hive, which are used for food storage and larval habitation, as well as caring for bees and queen bees, and guarding the hive. Bees are a perennial colony and will constantly have new queens raised, and the old queen and a group of worker bees leave the hive to rebuild a home elsewhere.
Bees live entirely on flowers, including pollen and nectar, and are sometimes brewed and stored as honey. There is no doubt that bees pollinate pollen at the same time, and when bees collect pollen between flowers, they will drop some pollen on the flowers. These fallen pollens are of great importance, as they often cause cross-pollination of plants. The actual value of bees as pollinators is greater than the value of their production of honey and beeswax.
From spring to late autumn, during the flowering season of plants, bees are busy every day. Winter is the only short period of leisure for bees. However, cold weather and low temperatures in the hive are not good for bees, because bees are warm animals, and their body temperature changes with the temperature of the surrounding environment. The wise little bee came up with a special way to resist the cold. When the temperature in the nest is as low as 13 ° C, they are close to each other in the hive, forming a spherical clump together, and the lower the temperature, the tighter the clumps, so that the surface area of the bee colony is reduced, the density increases, and the temperature is prevented from cooling too much. According to measurements, during the coldest time, the temperature inside the bee ball can still be maintained at about 24 ° C. At the same time, they also use more honey and intensive exercise to generate heat to raise the temperature inside the hive. When the weather is cold, the surface temperature of the bee ball is lower than the center of the ball, at this time the bees on the surface of the bee ball drill to the center of the ball, and the bees of the ball center move outward, so they take care of each other, constantly and repeatedly exchange positions, through the winter. How do they feed on the honey stored in the hive during the overwintering balling? Clever little bees have their own tricks. Instead of disbanding the sphere and crawling out to feed, they get feed by passing it to each other. This keeps the temperature in the sphere constant or less variable for a safe overwintering. Beekeepers use artificial methods to produce royal jelly, in fact, it is artificially made of some royal platforms, put into the hive, for the queen bee to lay eggs, wait for the small larvae to hatch, when the worker bees feed with royal jelly, the beekeeper will take out the royal jelly, this technology is actually a deception, it can be seen that even the smart little bees have been deceived.
Polyphagous nature of bees
On the legs of the bees are pollen balls
Bees that collect pollen, the bees' legs are pollen balls, pollen is the main source of protein nutrition for bees, and it is necessary to feed young bees. Adult bees can mainly eat nectar
Put the honey sac in the hive
Bees brew honey in the hive, the bees use the mouthpiece to collect nectar, the mouthpiece sucks the honey into the honey sac, and then goes home and puts the honey of the honey sac in the hive
That is, pollen and nectar are eaten on different families of plants or from flowers of a certain color (regardless of plant species), such as bees and bees.
Oligositivity is the feeding on flowers of plants of the family and genus, such as the alfalfa quasi-bee.
Monophagous is the feeding of only one plant or a close relative, such as the cornflower ground bee. The flowers of various types of bees are closely related to the length of the mouth organs: for example, species with shorter mouthparts such as tunnel bees, ground bees, and tongue-splitting bees are interviewed in Rosaceae, Cruciferaceae, Umbellifera, and Ranunculaceae
Flowers are placed; for the leaf-cutting bee, stripe bees, and bees, because of their long mouth organs, flowers with deep flower tubes such as legumes and lipids are interviewed.
Parasitic females do not build nests and lay their eggs in the host's nest. Juvenile larvae generally have large heads and palates that are used to destroy the host's eggs or juvenile larvae.
The nesting instinct of bees is complex, and the nesting location, time and structure of the nest are diverse. Nesting time is generally during the full flowering period of the plant. According to the location of nesting and the texture of the nest, it can be divided into the following types of bees:
(1) Species that live in social life use the wax secreted by themselves as the spleen, such as bee genus, thornless bee genus, wheat bee genus, etc. The nest chamber is hexagonal.
(2) The most types of nesting in the soil are the most, and the interior of the nest chamber is coated with a mixture of wax and saliva to maintain the humidity in the nest room.
(3) The use of plant tissue to build nests is more diverse, for example, the leaf-cutting bee genus can roll the leaves of plants into a barrel into a nest chamber and place them in natural holes; the maculata isp uses plant fur to make a warty nest on the stem; the reed wasp and the leaf tongue bee build nests in the dead plant stem; some species of the bumblebee genus nest under the dead branches and leaves of the forest; the wood wasp genus drills holes in the wood to make a nest, and so on.
(4) Others such as the genus stone bee uses saliva to glue small sandstone into a nest, and the genus wall bee nests in the shell of slugs.
Social bees live in groups, with three types of queen bees, worker bees and drones, with one queen bee in the group (with some exceptions there are two queens), 10,000 to 150,000 worker bees, and 500 to 1,500 male bees. Bees work non-stop to obtain food, collecting honey during the day and making honey at night, while completing pollination tasks for fruit trees, which is an important medium for pollination of crops.
Female and male bees live in the same nest, but differ in morphology, physiology and division of labor. Female individuals are larger, specializing in spawning and reproduction, males are smaller than females, specializing in mating, and die after mating; worker bees are smaller, female bees with underdeveloped genitalia, specializing in nesting, collecting food, feeding larvae, cleaning nests and regulating nest wetness. Both the bee and the medium bee are social species. In addition, there are bumblebee genus, tropical thornless bee genus, wheat bee genus and so on.
In the bee society, they still live a matrilineal clan life. Among the members of their large family of groups is a queen bee (queen bee), a female bee with reproductive abilities, responsible for laying eggs and reproducing offspring, while "ruling" the large family. Although the queen bee has mated, not all the eggs laid have been fertilized. It can be fed pollen by fertilized egg workers according to the needs of large families, and the bees can develop into female bees (worker bees without reproductive ability) after 21 days; they can also lay unfertilized eggs and develop into male bees after 24 days. When the large family members of this group multiply too much and cause crowding, they are divided into groups. The process of grouping is as follows: the worker bee creates a special hive - the royal platform, the queen bee lays fertilized eggs in the royal platform; after the small larvae hatch, the worker bees give special treatment, fed with the highly nutritious royal jelly produced in their bodies, and after 16 days, when the small larva develops into an adult, it becomes a new queen with reproductive ability, and the old queen bee leads a part of the worker bees to fly to form a new colony. Chinese Bee Apis cerana Fabr. and Italian Bee A. Mellifera L. is a commonly raised beneficial insect, in the breeding process, the new queen bee must be artificially divided into groups after birth, otherwise there will be a queen bee to lead a group of worker bees out of the hive to fly away and lose the productivity of the colony.
2. Population status of bees
Distribution of bees:
Bees originated in Asia and Europe, and were brought to the Americas by the British and Spaniards. There are about 15,000 known species of bees in the world and about 1,000 species in China. The geographical distribution of bees depends on the distribution of honey-sourced plants. It is distributed all over the world, and there are many species in the tropics and subtropics. The distribution of different subfamilies or genera has certain limitations, such as bumblebees in the bee family, which are predominantly in the northern temperate zone and extend to the Arctic, while in the tropics there is no record of distribution. The short-tongued bee family is found in Australia; the subgenus Ofchocephalus is found only in Central Asia; and the stingless wasp genus of the bee family is distributed in the tropics. Bees are found in different landscapes, most of which inhabit grasslands, forests, river valleys, mountains and deserts. Each landscape zone has representative genera or species, such as ground bumblebee is a forest grassland species, quasi-land bee is a typical grassland genus, and quasi-bee is mostly grassland species.
The current situation of Chinese bees and the current situation of Chinese bees:
South China Queen Bee, South China Male Bee, South China Central Bee Worker
The chinese bee (Chinese bee) has a 70 million years of evolutionary history, in our country, the bee cold resistance to predators far more than the Western bee species, some winter flowering plants such as no bee pollination, will inevitably affect the survival, many plants in our country to reproduce, the bee is indispensable. The pollination rate of chinese bees for apples is 30% higher than that of western bees, and they are resistant to low temperatures, early attendance, and good at collecting sporadic honey sources, which is of great significance to the protection of China's ecological environment. The sense of smell of foreign bees is not compatible with many tree species in China, so it is not possible to pollinate these plants, which is
This will lead to a decrease or even extinction of these plant species, ultimately destroying the ecological environment. Therefore, it is urgent to save and protect the Chinese bees.
Due to factors such as deforestation, indiscriminate application of pesticides, and environmental pollution, the survival crisis of the chinese bees has been caused. In addition, researchers pointed out that the introduction of foreign bees from Italy and other countries is the biggest threat to Chinese bees. These foreign bees have a strong attack on Chinese bees, and the wing vibration frequency is similar to that of Chinese male bees, resulting in Chinese bees being misidentified, so that they can smoothly enter the hive, and also get the treatment and feeding equivalent to companions. Different populations cannot coexist, and it is inevitable for foreign bees to kill the queen bee. To this end, China has built relatively closed reserves for chinese bees and black bees in Fangshan, Beijing and Raohe, Heilongjiang, and began to search for wild bees so that the chinese bees will not become extinct.
Wild Chinese honey bees native to Beijing have become extinct, and captive-bred domestic Chinese honey bee queens have also begun to die for unknown reasons, resulting in a decline in the population of Chinese bees (also known as Chinese bees). Chinese honey bees play an important role in balancing ecology, especially beneficial to plants in alpine mountains, many tree species in North China are flowering in early spring or late autumn, and some are sporadic flowering, if there is no bee, the powder of plants will be affected, which is also a property that other bee species do not have.
An excellent queen bee can lay about 1500 eggs per day and night during the spawning period, and its average lifespan is 3 to 5 years, and the longest can reach 8 to 9 years. However, in recent years, the lifespan of queen bees has become shorter and shorter, and some have not lived for more than a summer.
However, at the end of the 20th century, the Chinese bees in the northern region, north of the Yellow River, gradually decreased, and only a few hundred groups remained in Changbai Mountain. It is understood that the decrease in Chinese bees is mainly caused by the death of the queen bee due to unknown causes.
The number of Chinese bees in Beijing alone has shrunk from more than 40,000 colonies in the 1950s to less than 40 colonies in the early 2000s, reaching the point of endangerment.
The terrible thing is that once the Chinese honeybee is completely extinct, it will affect the changes in the entire plant symbiotic ecosystem associated with it. The relevant people of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have solved the mystery of the death of the queen bee for us, and the only Chinese honey bee reserve has been established in the north of China.
The bee saves feed, and this valuable and excellent special property provides more products for humans - honey. Various animals in nature have their own unique way of wintering, and bees are insects that live in semi-camp groups. The middle bee is tightly knotted, and during the wintering period, a large nest house in the lower part of the nest spleen is often knocked out, and the clumps are in the local area below the hive, and the bee colony is concentrated and tight. Consuming a small amount of feed, a small amount of exercise to produce a slight heat, maintaining a low limit of life activities, and maintaining the survival temperature required by the group, which is also the life habit of the middle bee that is conducive to the continuation of racial life in the process of long-term survival struggle.
Medium beeswax has strong ability, often destroying the nest spleen that they have painstakingly created, and tirelessly re-waxing the spleen. This habit of living likes the new and hates the old, can cope with the sudden change of the environment and the invasion of natural enemies at any time, and create a new home in time after moving, only with this characteristic, can we maintain ourselves in the ever-changing natural environment. Objectively speaking, it also plays a role in refining the hive, reducing bacteria and diseases in the nest and pollution, removing the eggs of pests, maintaining the normal life of the group and the healthy development of offspring. It can enable the queen bee to always lay eggs in the new nest, and the egg worms can develop and grow in a wide nest room, breeding robust new individuals, with the objective effect of eugenics and eugenics.
The individual bees are small, the tail is short, and although the collection power is low, the collection work of the bees is diligent, the cold resistance is strong, the early out and late return, the normal collection activities can be carried out at 9 °C, which makes up for the lack of short kiss and low collection power.
The bees in the middle are strong, the group of maintained is smaller than the western bees, the number of group growth is large, and the chance of survival in the process of survival struggle is large, which is also another manifestation of the struggle with survival.
Medium bees have poor orientation and are prone to nesting, which is related to long-term life in the vast wilderness, large group spacing, and few contact opportunities. This habit is detrimental to human management. After the loss of the queen of the middle bee colony, the rapid spawning phenomenon of worker bees, although it is a special phenomenon in the struggle for survival, it is bound to be unable to continue the life of the group.
3. Development of bee species
Pictures of Italian queen bees and worker bees and male bees
In 1758, Linnaeus C first recorded the first genera (Apis) and the first species (Apis mellifera L.).
By 1980, due to the scope of specimen collection at that time, the limitations of the study of bee biology and the lack of evidence for some new species of bees, there were only four recognized bee species in the world at that time, namely the large bee (Apis dorsata Fabricius), the small bee (Apis florea Fabricius), the Oriental bee (Apis cerana Linnaeus) and the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera). Linnaeus)。
In 1985, Chinese scholars conducted multidisciplinary comparative studies of morphology, biology, ecology, insect geography, cytogenetics and molecular biochemistry on six species of bees collected from Yunnan, and determined that Apis laboriosa Smith and small black bees (Apis andreniformis Smith) were independent bee species, and their taxonomic status was determined.
In 1988, foreign scholars established Apis indica-koschevnikovi bee, described and named by Buttel-Reepen in 1903, as an independent bee species - Apis koschevnikovi Buttel-Reepen. So far, the world has established 7 species of bees.
At that time, it was more recognized that the 7 clear living varieties of the genus Bee (living species: refers to the varieties that appeared in the history of the earth, fossils have been found, and have been living so far) according to the name:
Western Bee Apis Mellifera Linnaeus 1758
Little Bee A. florea Fabricius 1787
Big Bee A. dorsata Fabricius 1793
Oriental Bee A. cerana Fabricius 1793
Black Bee A. andreniformis Smith 1858
Black Bee A. laboriosa Smith 1871
Sabah Bee A. koschevnikovi Buttel-Reepen 1906。
In 1998, the Germans Koeniger and Koeniger and Malaysia's Tingek reported on a new species of bees they had discovered, apis nulunsis Tingek. Koeniger and Koeniger）。
Classification of bees
In the same year, G. w． After years of comparative studies of morphology and biology, 0tis and S. Hadisoesilo established the original Smith-named Sulawesi bee [Apis nigrocincta (Smith)] in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and the Philippines as an independent bee species. As a result, there are 9 species of bees in the world.
(1) Little Black Bee Apis andreniformis Smith;
(2) Little Bee Apis florea Fabricius;
(3) The great black bee Apis laboriosa Smith;
(4) Apis dorsata Fabricius;
(5) Apis koschevnikovi Buttel-Reepen;
(6) Green Bee Apis nulunsis Tingek. Koeniger and Koeniger；
(7) Sulawesi apis nigrocincta Smith;
(8) Oriental Bee Apis cerana Fabricius;
(9) Western Bee Apis mellifera L.
Most of China is dominated by Italian bees (Western bees), accounting for 2/3; the concentrated distribution area of Chinese bees (Chinese bees) is in the southwest and the provinces south of the Yangtze River, with Zhejiang, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, Hubei, Anhui, Hunan, Jiangxi and other provinces and regions with the largest number, accounting for 1/3. There are also a small number of black bees.
4. The specific division of labor of bees
queen bee
The queen's task is to lay eggs, and the secretion of the queen's substance hormone can inhibit the ovarian development of the worker bee and affect the behavior of the worker bee within the hive. The queen bee is bred from fertilized eggs built by worker bees. Worker bees take special care of the fertilized eggs in the queen bee fetus and feed the royal jelly until the larvae pupate, so that the queen bee larvae are infiltrated on the royal jelly. Royal jelly is rich in protein, vitamins and biohormonals, which plays an important role in promoting the growth and development of queen bee larvae, especially the development of female reproductive organs. As the queen bee larvae grow, the worker bee raises the pedestal and finally covers it.
Queen bee, male bee, worker bee
The queen bee is the largest and longest. The queen bee lays eggs in the nest room, the larvae live in the nest room, the larvae that manage social life are fed by the worker bees, and the larvae that operate the solitary life eat the bee food stored in the nest room by the female bees, and when the bee food is eaten, the larva matures and pupates, and breaks out of the cocoon when feathering. Domestic bees breed several generations a year, and wild bees breed 1 to 3 generations a year. Overwinter with old mature larvae, pupae or adults. The queen bee can lay eggs for life after one mating, and if the queen has mated two or three times, the life span of the queen will be shortened.
The new queen bee who has been feathered out of the house has a tender body, and the worker bee combs the fluff on her body, and the queen who has successfully mated soon begins to lay eggs. The virgin queen bee generally no longer nests after mating, except for the bees. The queen bee is slender and stable, and its lifespan is generally three to five years, and the longest can live for eight or nine years. Spawning is highest in the spring and around the flowering period.
drone
The male is responsible for breeding offspring with the queen. Male bees-born have only one mating with the queen bee and die within minutes of the end of mating. The number of male bees is large, and there may be nearly a thousand in a group. The male's sole duty is to mate with the queen bee, and when mating the queen flies out of the nest, the male bee in the whole group follows the chase, a move called marriage flight. The queen bee's wedding and mate selection is carried out through flying competitions, and only the winner can become a spouse. After mating, the male bee's genitals fall off the queen's genitals, at which point the male bee completes its life's mission and dies. Those male bees that failed to mate with the queen bee returned to the nest, only knew how to eat and drink, could not collect honey, and became the excess "lazy man" in the bee colony. However, these male bees constantly flap their wings in the hive, inadvertently maintaining the temperature in the hive. But over time, the workers will expel them. Beekeepers are also reluctant to retain too many male bees in the colony and consume honey, so they are manually eliminated. From this point of view, the worker bees are the most abundant in this group. The number of worker bees maintained by beekeepers in a bee colony varies from season to season, generally 21,000 to 50,000 worker bees. Worker bees are the most industrious, and the children's song "little bees, busy all day, picking nectar, making honey", only refers to the worker bees. In addition to collecting flour and brewing honey, nest building, feeding larvae, cleaning the environment, and defending the bee colony are also the tasks of worker bees.
Male bees do not participate in brewing and gathering production, and individuals are larger than worker bees. Males are developed from unfertilized eggs. It develops in the larger male hive, and the worker bees feed it better. The whole developmental process. Male bee larvae eat one or two times more than worker bee larvae. The development of the male wasp reproductive system takes a long time, and it takes about eight to fourteen days after feathering to reach sexual maturity. When the male is sexually mature, a large number of sperm mature in the seminal tubules in the sperm nest, and are gradually discharged into the seminal vesicles, generally the amount of semen in the seminal vesicles of a male wasp is 1.5-2.0 μL (microliters). There are an average of 7.5 million sperm per microliter of semen. Sperm population and motility have a direct impact on the genetic traits and development of swarm offspring. Therefore, it is as important to select a population of high-quality genetic offspring as a father as the selection of a high-quality queen bee.
Males usually do not live long, do not collect pollen, and are not responsible for feeding the young bees. Worker bees are responsible for all nesting and food storage, and usually have special structural tissues to facilitate the carrying of pollen. Most bees collect pollen from a variety of flowers, but some bees only collect pollen from certain families of flowers, some only pollen from certain colors, and some bees only collect pollen from relatives. The bees' mouths are pollen collectors and carrying utensils that seem to be adaptable to a variety of different species of flowers. The bee makes sounds because it has a vocal organ, which is located in two extremely small black dots in the bee's abdomen.
worker bee
Worker bees are female bees that lack reproductive abilities, and among the female bees in the colony, only queen bees have reproductive abilities. But studies have found that some worker bees deceive the queen by breeding to prolong their lives. Most female bees in the larval stage, only the first few days can eat royal jelly, and then switch to feeding general honey, so that they can not complete the development of reproductive ability, and finally become worker bees; if they can continue to eat royal jelly, they will eventually become queen bees (that is, commonly known as queen bees). Worker bees in the same hive, depending on their age, can be divided into three biologically different groups of worker bees – conservation bees, nesting bees and bees. After a worker bee stings a person, its stinging needles remain in the human skin along with the intestines, so it will soon die.
The tasks of worker bees are mainly to collect food, feed larvae, wax and spleen, pulp clearance, build hives, and protect nests to attack enemies. The various jobs in the hive are basically done by the worker bees; the worker bees, like the queen bee, are developed from fertilized eggs. Nurse worker bees do not take the same care of them as well as the queen bee larvae, feeding royal jelly only for the first three days after hatching, and only the powder mixture from day 4 onwards. Because this feed is not as nutritious as royal jelly, and it lacks biological hormones that promote ovarian development. As a result, the reproductive organ development of the worker bee is inhibited until it feathers into an adult bee, which has only a few ovarian tubes in its ovaries and loses its normal reproductive function. So, they are underdeveloped female wasps.
The lifespan of worker bees is generally 30 to 60 days. During the northern wintering period, worker bees are less active, and wintering bees that do not participate in feeding larvae can live to five to six months. The number of worker bees in each colony determines the prosperity of the bee colony.
Honeycomb features
Hives are generally scattered, but there are also bees of the same species that have been clustered in one location for many years to form nests. For example, the number of nests in the genus Hairy-footed bees can reach dozens or even hundreds.
Intergroup relationships
Although bees live in groups, swarms and swarms do not collude with each other. The hive contains a large amount of feed, and in order to protect the bees from the outside swarms of bees and other insects and animals, the bees form the ability to guard the hive. Sting needles are the main organs of self-defense of bees.
Bees have a keen sense of smell, and they are able to identify bees in the outer colony based on their smell. There are often bees guarding the nest gate, so that the bees from the outside group are not allowed to sneak into the nest casually. In the absence of honey sources, there are often bees that are not from their own group sneak into the nest to steal honey, and the guard bees immediately fight. but
Outside the hive, the situation is different, for example, in the flowers or drinking water, different groups of bees are together, not hostile to each other, not interfering with each other.
The female bee that flies out of the mating will sometimes stray into the outer group, at which time the worker bee immediately surrounds it and stabs the female bee.
The male bee is different if it is to stray into the outer colony, and the worker bee does not harm it, because the bee breeds the male bee not only for the reproductive needs of the group, but also for the survival of the race.
5. How bees reproduce
The virgin queen bee (female) mates with the male bee and then stores sperm in the body for several years. The queen bee is free to lay fertilized or unfertilized eggs.
The hive is available in 3 sizes. The smallest is the worker hive (horizontal ground), the male hive diameter is 1 mm larger than the worker hive, the largest royal hive is usually at least when breeding the queen bee worker bee at the bottom of the hive to start making the queen hive, face down (vertical ground).
The queen bee lays unfertilized eggs in the male hive and develops into male bees (parthenogenesis).
The queen bee lays fertilized eggs in the worker hive and the queen beehive to develop into a worker bee and a queen bee.
All bee larvae are fed royal jelly for the first 3 days and worker bees and male bee larvae are fed honey and pollen after 3 days. Only the larvae in the royal hive are always fed royal jelly to develop fully into the queen bee.
Gender determination
The sex of an organism is not necessarily determined by sex chromosomes, and in bees and ants, sex is determined by the number of chromosomes (or groups of chromosomes), not the sex chromosomes. Bees and ants do not have sex chromosomes in their bodies.
Both the queen bee and the worker bee are females, developed from fertilized eggs, and each somatic cell contains 32 chromosomes, two groups of chromosomes, which are diploid;
The number of male individuals in the population is small, developed from unfertilized egg cells, and the somatic cells contain 16 chromosomes, a chromosome group, which is haploid.
Bees are made up of queen bees, male bees and worker bees, of which queen and worker bees are developed from fertilized eggs, and males are developed from unfertilized egg cells. The queen and worker bees are diploid (2n=32) and the male is haploid (n=16). How do haploid male wasps produce sperm? During the production of sperm, the male iswolf spermatoblasts undergo a special form of meiosis. In the first division of the meiolar, the number of chromosomes does not change, but the cytoplasm is divided into two parts of unequal size. The larger part contains the complete nucleus, and the smaller part is just a clump of cytoplasm, which will degenerate and disappear after a period of time. The second division of the meiolar is an ordinary mitosis: in the cytoplasm containing the nucleus, the chromatids are separated from each other, while the cytoplasm is divided unevenly, the part containing more cytoplasm (containing 16 chromosomes) further develops into sperm, and the part containing less cytoplasm (also containing 16 chromosomes) gradually degenerates. The male wasp's 1 spermblast, through this meiosis, produces only 1 sperm, and both sperm cells and sperm are haploid cells. This particular type of meiosis is called "pseudomeiosis."
Developmental processes
Eggs, larvae, pupae and adults
Bees are fully metamorphosed insects, and the three types of bees all go through four stages of development: eggs, larvae, pupae and adult (adult bees).
The 4 stages of bees are morphologically different, they are:
ovum
Banana-shaped, milky white, the egg membrane is slightly transparent, the slightly thinner end is the end of the abdomen, and the slightly thicker end is the head. The eggs laid by the queen bee are slightly thinner at the bottom of the nest house and the slightly thicker end towards the nest entrance. The embryos inside the eggs hatch the larvae after 3 days of development.
larvae
White worm-like. Initially C-shaped, as the worm grows, the worm straightens out and faces the nest. It is fed by worker bees during the larval stage. Female larvae hatched from fertilized eggs develop into worker bees if fed larval pulp with honey and pollen added to the royal jelly for the first 3 days. The same female larvae, if fed a large amount of royal jelly uninterruptedly during the larval stage, will develop into a queen bee.
The worker bee larvae grow to the end of the 6th, and the worker bee seals the wax cover on the mouth of its nest. Cover the nest of the larvae to spit silk into a cocoon, and then pupate. The capping larvae and pupae are collectively called caps, and the nest spleen with most caps is called the lidding spleen (pupal spleen). The lid of the worker bee pupae is slightly protruding, and the entire lid spleen looks relatively flat. Male bee pupae have raised caps and large nests, making them easy to distinguish. Worker bee larvae pupate at the end of 2 days after capping.
chrysalis
Larvae, pupae
Bee larvae and bee pupae pictures, pupae and larvae are all growing in bee hives and cannot move during development. The pupal stage is mainly to modify and differentiate the internal organs to form various organs into bees. Gradually showing the head, chest, abdomen three parts, appendages are also exposed, the color gradually becomes darker from milky white. Mature pupae, shedding their pupal shells, bite through the nest cover, and feather into adult bees.
Adult bees
The exoskeleton of the newly exodusked bee is softer, the villi on the surface of the body are very tender, and the body color is lighter. Soon the bones hardened, the four wings straightened, and various organs in the body gradually matured.
6. Taxonomic evolution of bees
According to fossil data, bees have been found in large quantities in tertiary Late Eocene strata. Its appearance is closely related to the flourishing of flowering plants in the late Cretaceous period.
Taxonomically , the bee family is close to the mud bee family , whose ancestors may have originated from a branch of the mud bee family. However, due to different eating habits, morphological characteristics also tend to diverge. The evolutionary characteristics of bees are: chewing suction mouth organs, pollination organ formation, body hair branching; adult and juvenile eating nectar and pollen; the emergence of social lifestyles; the emergence of polymorphisms and parasitics in the general family.
In insect order, bees belong to advanced evolutionary taxa. The emergence of social lifestyles, the transmission of "language" information, the method of identifying the hive through the "dance" movement, and the different structures of the nest.
7. The relationship between bees and humans
Economic significance
Bees are one of the insect taxa beneficial to humans and usually refer broadly to production bee species: Western honey bees and Chinese honey bees. It pollinates crops, fruit trees, vegetables, pastures, camellia oleifera crops and Chinese medicinal plants.
Honey: Is a nutrient-rich natural nourishing food and one of the most commonly used tonics. According to the analysis, it contains a variety of inorganic salts and vitamins, iron, calcium, copper, manganese, potassium, phosphorus and other organic acids and trace elements beneficial to human health that are similar to the serum concentration of the human body. It is a commonly used tonic and is known as the "milk of the elderly".
Royal jelly is a high-grade nutritional product, which can not only enhance physical fitness, prolong life, but also treat chronic diseases such as neurasthenia, anemia, and stomach ulcers.
Bee pollen is known as a "micro-nutrient library", after drying the color varies, can be eaten directly or soaked in cold water as a drink.
Beeswax and propolis: both raw materials for light industry. Propolis is also known as "purple gold" and is produced less than gold worldwide.
Bee venom: it is effective for rheumatism, neuritis, etc. Clamp the worker bee with a clip, and use its tail needle to nail the patient's acupuncture points, so that the bee venom can enter the body and achieve a certain therapeutic effect.
In addition to providing honey, royal jelly, bee venom and beeswax to people, bees mainly pollinate various crops to increase yield. 1/3 of human food directly or indirectly depends on insect pollination, and 80% of this 1/3 is carried out by bees. Bees are the most ideal pollinating insects for a variety of crops and are known as the "wings of agriculture".
Bees can become the most ideal and important pollinating insects among many pollinators because of the morphological peculiarities of bees. The bee has a long tongue tube (snout) and has a dexterous pollen brush, pollen oak, pollen rake and pollen basket, which can adapt to the collection of flowers from a variety of crops without harming the flowers. Bees have fluff around them, and some are split feathers to facilitate adhesion to pollen. A bee can carry up to 5 million pollen grains throughout the body and collect thousands of flowers every day, and its pollination efficiency can be imagined. The bee has a specific nature of flower picking, and it only collects nectar and pollen from the same plants every time it leaves the nest. Bees are a social insect, a group of bees have 50,000-100,000 as many, it can be a large number of breeding and breeding, so that for large-scale flowering crops, fruit trees people can use bees to pollinate in a planned way to achieve the purpose of large-scale increase in yield.
Here are two pictures: on the left is a picture of the beekeeper's beehive, there are many bees at the door of the hive, and on the right is a picture of the bees on the hive
Collection of honey
Bees brew honey in their hives
Beekeepers (commonly known as beekeepers) are one of the more difficult people among farmers, and their income is relatively low, and they need to eat and sleep in the wind all year round, and go south to the north. There are about 6-7 million bees in China, about 200,000-300,000 beekeepers, and about 50,000-60,000 people engaged in bee product processing. The "standard configuration" of a beekeeper is 50 boxes of bees, and based on an average of 20,000 per box, a beekeeper has to take care of millions of people. The beekeeping industry is very mobile, and most beekeepers have to chase the flowering period and move to the land to keep bees. In China, there are two main beekeeper transfer routes: one is the northeast line, from the Hainan coast to the north, through Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Shandong to Heilongjiang, and then south from Hubei, Hunan back to the south; the second is the northwest line, from Yunnan to Sichuan to Shaanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang; every year from February to May, in China and even in all the rape flower production areas will see the busy figure of beekeepers and bees.
Beekeepers manage bee farms
Beekeepers are mostly half experts and must be highly involved in bee life, and their daily work includes shaking honey, breeding bee colonies, cultivating queen bees, separating too strong bee colonies, collecting royal jelly, collecting pollen, etc. Every morning at 6 o'clock, you need to check the hive to see if there are natural enemies of bees such as horse bees and toads; in addition, you should often exchange nest spleens, transfer the nest spleen with larvae to the upper part of the hive, and transfer the empty nest spleen to the lower part for the queen bee to lay eggs; then you can collect royal jelly, roughly every three days, a group of bees can produce 5-10 kg of royal jelly a year. Honey shake is generally in the afternoon, and a box of bees can be shaken once every two days on a sunny day. For beekeepers, the most affected natural disasters are cold and rainy, rainy days bees can not collect flour, at the beginning can also eat honey, and when the honey is eaten, it may starve to death in large numbers, at this time beekeepers need to use white sugar to feed. China's beekeeping industry has great potential for development, and the current beekeeping density is less than 20% of European countries. According to the USDA experiment, the pollination behavior of bees can increase the yield of agricultural products by 30-40%, up to 80%, of which male bees have the best pollination effect on greenhouse plants. It can be said that the output value of bee pollination to increase the production of agricultural products is 60-80 times the output value of the beekeeping industry itself.
Honey is an active substance that is not easy to preserve, so beekeepers usually adopt the model of stocking and selling, and if good quality honey is needed, it is best to buy it directly from familiar beekeepers. The price of different types of honey is also very different, the best first-class honey sources come from lychees, citrus, linden trees, locust flowers, purple clouds, wattle flowers, etc., and rapeseed is second-class honey. From the perspective of production, China's annual output of honey is about 200,000-300,000 tons, half of which is used for export. Among them, the production of rapeseed nectar is the highest, accounting for about 25-30%. Domestic honey sales volume is 600,000-700,000 tons per year. That is to say, some of the honey currently sold in China is not real honey. In the production of royal jelly, rape nectar-based to account for half; because royal jelly is a necessary food to maintain the survival of the royal jelly, the yield is relatively small, many beekeepers do not sell royal jelly, pure royal jelly "strength" is very large and special taste, difficult to bite, the human stomach is difficult to adapt (will diarrhea), very little direct consumption; most of the royal jelly on the market has been mixed with the results of honey many times, according to the ratio of royal jelly and honey mixed with the so-called "royal jelly" (market products) is already very good, Generally, the proportion is lower. Generally speaking, honey, especially honey purchased directly from beekeepers, is likely to be inconsistent in color and precipitation, such as exquisite packaging, the color and appearance of honey are particularly uniform, and the price is extremely low (less than 10 yuan / kg).
crisis
The first is that alien species contribute to the decline of native bees. For example, in China, Western bees were introduced as early as 1896, and Western bees were introduced on a large scale twice in the 1930s and 1960s. The introduced Western bees are larger, they savagely steal the honey of Chinese bees, interfere with the tailing of Chinese bees, and bring in pathogens, so that the original chinese bee population in China is greatly reduced, it is difficult to find wild Chinese bee colonies. The same situation exists in many countries.
The massive disappearance of bees is reminiscent of Einstein's prediction: "If bees disappear from the earth, humans will only have to live another 4 years." Whether Einstein really said it or not we don't care, but the importance of bees to humans is self-evident.
Bees are a type of pollinator and play a vital role in the pollening process. 76% of the world's food crops and 84% of plants rely on them to teach pollen. The decline in bee populations means that the yields of food crops, fruits, nuts and flowers will decline with them. According to a 2008 study by a scientist, the value of all pollinating insects to food crops (excluding livestock feed) is about 153 billion euros per year. The continued decline in wild pollinating insects and the difficulty of cultivation make the growth of grains increasingly dependent on pollination by bees. The data from 1950 to 1980 and 1980 to 2005 in the United Kingdom show that while bees are decreasing, many plants also have a corresponding parallel decline trend, that is, the decline of bees and the decline of plants are positively correlated. Although there is no definitive conclusion as to why and what happened to these things, we can clearly see that there is some causal link between the extinction of bees and related plants.
Importance for a long time, human beings have held the idea of "anthropocentrism", the entire natural environment and various components of it are regarded as human tools, with the help of modern technology and mechanical means, standing on the status of higher life, with their own will, wishes and interests, to transform various creatures in nature, in addition to the bees that have been artificially selected by genes, there are various genetically modified animals and plants. These transformed creatures have lost their own value and freedom of existence, as well as the god-given right to choose, and also caused the ecology to lose its original balance. The power of natural selection has been tested by long-term practice, the impact of the survival of many species on the ecology can not be seen in a short period of time, perhaps the disappearance of humans after the disappearance of bees for 4 years is not just a gimmick - the rupture of some key links in the food chain will often quickly lead to the rupture of the entire food chain and even the entire ecological chain. Every species and every life on the earth is worthy of respect and protection, and it is the fundamental way of human survival to live in harmony with various creatures in nature, to correct people's position in nature, and to use human strength to make the natural environment and ecology more harmonious and beautiful.
8. Bee related knowledge
To brew 500 grams of honey, worker bees need to fly back and forth 37,000 times to find and collect nectar and bring it back to the hive.
Bees' wings can flap 200 to 400 times per second.
The top speed at which bees fly is 40 km/h. When it returned home with a full load, it flew at a speed of 20 to 24 kilometers per hour. A hive has an average of 50,000 hives and is inhabited by 35,000 busy bees. A bee's furry body can hold between 50,000 and 750,000 grains of pollen.
A tablespoon of honey can provide enough energy for a bee to fly around the earth once. The lifespan of worker bees is 38 days in summer and 6 months in winter.
The lifespan of a queen bee is generally 4 to 5 years.
With 5 compound eyes and 3 single eyes, the bee's viewing angle can reach almost 360 degrees.
Inside the hive there will be a type of bee called a "heating bee" dedicated heating, the maximum temperature can reach 44 degrees Celsius.
The bees will also change the index in time, relying on the polarized beam reflected from the sky to determine the orientation and return to the nest in time. It is worth mentioning that the sound of the bee is not due to the vibration of the wings, the two black dots at the root of the bee wings that are smaller than rapeseed, and when the bees call, the small black dots are agitated up and down. This is the reason why bees make sounds. If you use a pin to puncture a small black spot, the bee will not make a sound.
9. The social life of bees
In the social life of bees, worker bees bear the heavy tasks of nesting, pollening, honey making, and child-rearing. Before a large number of worker bees go out to collect honey, they send "reconnaissance bees" to find the source of honey. When the reconnaissance bee finds a source of honey within 100 meters of the hive, it returns to the nest to report the message, and in addition to leaving tracking information, it alternately turns a small circle to the left or right on the hive, crawling in a "round dance" manner. When the food is 10 to 100 meters, the round dance of most species of bees and worker bees gradually becomes a "sickle dance" or "crescent dance". The scythe dance is a transitional form of round dance to a swing tail dance. If the honey source is 100 meters away from the hive, the reconnaissance bee changes its dance posture and shows the word "∞", so it is also called "8-character dance" or "tail dance". If all crawl routes are connected, the longer the straight crawl, the farther away from the honey source. The straight line crawl lasts for 1 second, indicating that it is about 500 meters away from the honey source, and if it lasts for 2 seconds, it is about 1000 meters. When the scout bee performs this kind of performance, the surrounding worker bees will stretch out the tentacles on their heads and compete to collide with the dancer's body, which may be from it to learn information. The "tail swinging dance" danced by the reconnaissance bee can not only indicate the distance from the honey source, but also play a role in specifying the direction. The direction of the honey source is represented by the angle formed in the hive by the central axis of the "tail dance" dance. In the event of a rainy day, the use of dance positioning method is a bit out of order. One might ask, how did the other accomplices understand the various dance moves performed by the worker bees in the beehives of the black hole hole. It turned out that they used the trembling tentacles on their heads to touch the body of the worker bee, so that the "dance language" was converted into "contact language" to obtain information. This method of transmission sometimes fails. To this end, they also use the constant vibration of the wings to produce different frequencies of "buzzing" sounds, which are used to supplement the lack of "dance language" and strengthen the expression ability of tone.
The main natural enemy of bees is the wasp. All bees feed on pollen and nectar. Nectar in the digestive tract can be converted into honey. All female bees have a spine. Both bees and large bees (a larger, rounder bee with a black body) are insects, but most of the bees of this species live alone, with some bees living in the honeycombs of other bees and receiving food from other bees. The typical group of bees consists of an egg-laying queen, a sexlessly undeveloped female (worker bee); and many fertile males.
(Pictures and texts are arranged on the Internet, invaded and deleted)