It’s amazing how many bees can fit behind a wall. In the below clip, we get to see the incredible colony that these bees have built in a Louisiana home. We also get to see them removed by experts and settled into their new home where, hopefully, they can get back to making delicious honey!
Watch the Full Video in this Incredible Footage Below!
How Is a Colony of Bees Organized?
It takes a lot of organization to construct something this impressive! Honey bees are social insects and live together in family groups. They work as a team and have excellent communication to control their environment and divide tasks between them. The bees can only survive by cooperating with the other bees in the colony.
Typically, there are three kinds of adult bees in the colony, they are the workers, the drones, and the queen. It is the worker bees that build the nest and each has a specific task depending on their age. A nest can have as many as 60,000 workers.
What Is the Function of the Queen Bee?
You can’t miss the excitement amongst these bee removal experts when they find the queen. She is obviously a lot bigger than the other bees and finding her was important for the success of the removal job.
For most of its life, the colony will only have one queen bee. She is the only sexually developed female and her job is to produce young. To achieve this, she can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day and more than a million in her lifetime. She can be easily spotted because her body is longer. Also, she has no pollen baskets – these are the flattened areas on the bee’s hind legs that are used for carrying pollen. Queens also do not have functional wax glands and have a curved stinger. Queen bees can live up to five years but most only last between two and three years.
Her other function is to produce pheromones. These chemical messengers help to bond the colony together and make them work as a team. She produces these in glands such as the mandibular glands.
The queen is constantly attended to by the workers and is fed royal jelly. It is rich in essential carbohydrates, amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals and is taken by some humans as a nutritional supplement.
Is it Normal For Honey Bees to Create Hives in Homes?
Honey bees are not ground-based builders, like the bumble bee, and prefer to build hives in dark areas, most often in trees and tree crevices. although they have been known to use rock crevices as well. Houses and buildings may not seem like their usual choice for hive-making but due to a scarcity of available locations, they will make nests any place they are able to. As they prefer these dark crevices, they are more frequently found in homes, chimneys, water meters, and barbecue grills. It is normal to find honey bees in or around homes.
Although the bees in this video are identified as honey bees, there are numerous types of bees that may inhabit your home on occasion. Carpenter bees also like to find wooded areas to build nests which can often be found inside house walls. Just like the common European honey bee, they are not aggressive and will seldom sting unless they feel the hive is threatened. Africanized honey bees, on the other hand, are quite aggressive so should a hive be found in any of these non-typical areas, it is always best to call a professional.
How Large Are Honey Bee Colonies?
Honey bee colonies, or hives, can grow quite large. As one hive is the heartbeat of the bee community, it must serve the queen bee, as well as her thousands of worker bees and drones, that help her increase the numbers daily. The queen may lay an average of 1,500 to 2,000 eggs per day. The hive may be comprised of anywhere from 10,000 to over 70,000 bees. The actual hive size can vary but the standard size is 19 7/8″ in length, 16 1/4″ wide, and 9 5/8″ in height.
The photo featured at the top of this post is © iStock.com/djiledesign
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