Bees are social insects and live in groups. Bee colony is an organism composed of many bees with three different forms and functions, and it is a biological unit on which bees live. Although a single bee is also an independent organism, once it leaves the colony, it cannot survive. This socialized social life of bees is in the process of long-term evolution and development. Bee colony is also the production unit of various Eucharist bee products, and performs pollination function for plants.
Description of species: bees are completely abnormal insects, and their individual development has to go through eggs and larvae all their lives. Pupa and adult four stages. Bees are social insects. A normal bee colony consists of a queen bee, tens of thousands of worker bees and hundreds of drones cultivated during the breeding period. Live in the same nest. They have obvious differences in morphology, physiology and function, and have a strict and clear division of labor.
1, queen bee.
Queen bee, also known as queen bee, is large and well developed, specializing in fertility and spawning; The only function of drones is to mate with the queen bee, reproduce and die after mating.
2. worker bees.
In the bee colony, the number accounts for the vast majority of the bee colony. Worker bees are female bees with incomplete reproductive organs and have no reproductive ability. Small individuals, their function is to collect pollen, nectar, make honey, feed larvae and queen bees, and undertake the work of nesting, cleaning the hive, adjusting the temperature and humidity in the nest and resisting enemies.
The head of the worker bee is triangular, with 1 pair of developed compound eyes and three single eyes. It can detect the honey source, identify the nest and find the way, fly far when going out to collect honey, and return to the nest accurately. Worker bees have a keen sense of smell, can detect distant flowers, find honey sources and distinguish smells, and have developed mouthparts, which are suitable for chewing and sucking nectar. A kind of bee milk secreted by the pharyngeal gland, which is used to feed the queen bee. There are wax glands in the abdomen, which can secrete flowers and provide nesting. There are poisonous glands and stingers at the end of abdomen, which release bee venom when stinging; There are three pairs of feet, and there are special structures in femoral joint, tibial joint and tarsal joint for collecting pollen.
When the queen bee is sexually mature, she usually flies out of the nest in sunny and calm weather and mates with several drones when flying in the air. After that, they don't mate for life, and a large number of sperm have been stored in their seminal vesicles, which can be used for laying eggs and fertilization for life. 2 ~ 3 days after mating, they began to lay eggs in the nest room. A high-yield queen bee can lay 1500 ~ 2000 eggs in a short time. Eggs hatch into larvae after 3 ~ 4 days of embryo development, mature after a few days, and then emerge into adults after pre-pupation and pupation 1 1 ~ 12 days.
The eggs laid by the queen bee are divided into unfertilized eggs and fertilized eggs, and the unfertilized eggs develop into drones; Fertilized eggs develop into worker bees; If the fertilized egg is placed in a wide conical base with its mouth facing down and specially fed with nutritious bee milk, it will grow into a queen bee.
How many bees can be collected to brew 1kg honey a day?
People often say "hardworking bees", which is no exaggeration. In sunny weather, bees are always busy in the wild. A bee needs to collect about 1000 flowers to fill its fruit. When the crop is full, it will go home and empty it, and the bees will collect new pollen. It flies 10 times a day. To brew 1 kg honey, it takes about 60,000 bees to collect it all day.
Bee stings can only be used once in a lifetime.
Bees sting people with needles to protect the interests of bees, but it will not bring any benefits to individual bees. After the sting, the sting remained in the victim's body. Because of the loss of the sting, the bee's body has been seriously damaged and will soon die. It can be said that the bee sacrificed its life for its collective. Bees certainly can't think, but when they are in danger, they will instinctively tell them to use thorns. If bees are allowed to live a quiet life, there is no doubt that they are only willing to make honey rather than fight. For a single bee, stinging means the end of life, but for the whole bee colony, it has gained the greatest benefit: other animals realize that honey is delicious, but it is better to stay away from bees.
Can humans understand the language of bees?
Biologist Karl von Frisch studies the language of bees. He asked his assistant to put a honey dish somewhere nearby, while he stayed by the hive. Soon, a bee found the honey dish, flew back to the hive and began to describe her findings to her companions in its dance language. Scientists observed it carefully and made a lot of records. After repeated experiments, scientists finally understood the significance of various dance forms of bees and decoded the dance language of bees. Studies have proved that the description of food distance in the dance language of bees can even be accurate to the meter.
Where is the bee calling?
People's Network Wuhan 2003 165438+ 10/8 Recently, the deputy head of science and technology of Jianli County, Hubei Province came to Huangxiekou Town Central Primary School to visit a sixth-grade pupil named Nie Li and asked her a question: What are the bees buzzing on?
"Bees have their own vocal organs. They don't make sounds by vibrating their wings. " Nie Li said.
In mid-August, at the 18 National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Competition held in Lanzhou, 12-year-old Nie Li wrote a scientific paper "Bees don't need wings to vibrate", and won the Silver Award for Excellent Science and Technology Projects and the Gao Shiqi Special Prize for Popular Science.
This conclusion was reached by Nie Li after observing and testing bees for more than one year.
In the autumn of 200 1, Nie Li learned from the book "Guide to Nature Learning in Primary Schools" that bees, flies, mosquitoes and other insects are dumb. They have no vocal organs, but they have screaming wings. These insects keep flapping their wings at high speed during flight, which makes the air vibrate, thus producing a buzz. Later, Nie Li also saw in "100,000 Why" that the buzz of bees came from the vibration of wings, reaching 200 times per second. If the wings stop vibrating, the sound will stop. She asked the teacher for verification, and the teacher's point of view was the same as that in the book.
Last spring, Nie Li went to a beehive to play, and found that many bees gathered on the beehive, their wings were not flapping, and they were still buzzing. So she questioned the teaching materials, popular science books and teachers' explanations and began experiments and research on bees. First, she glued the bee's wings to the board, and the bee would still make a sound. She cut off the wings of the bees, and she could hear the bees chirping. The two methods were carried out alternately for 42 times, using 48 bees each time. The experimental results show that bees can make sounds without flapping their wings. In order to explore the vocal organs of bees, she glued the bees to the board, looked for them carefully with a magnifying glass and observed them for more than a month. Finally, two black spots smaller than rapeseed were found at the root of bee wings. When the bees buzz, the black spots stir up and down. She pricked the little black spot with a needle, and the bee stopped making noise. She also found some bees. They didn't damage their wings, but just pierced the little black spots and put them into the mosquito net. Bees fly around, and there is no sound anymore. She repeated the experiment 10 times and the results were the same. She wrote this discovery into her paper and thought that the vocal organs of bees were these two small black spots.
It is reported that Nie Li's paper has been included as a collection of winning works by the organizing committee of the competition, and Nie Li's paper has also been published in the Journal of China Education Association and the Professional Committee of Nature Teaching in Primary Schools.
Do bees make sounds by the high-speed vibration of their wings?
Nie Li, a pupil, found that bees don't make sounds by flapping their wings.
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People's Network Wuhan 2003 165438+ 10/8 Recently, the deputy head of science and technology of Jianli County, Hubei Province came to Huangxiekou Town Central Primary School to visit a sixth-grade pupil named Nie Li and asked her a question: What are the bees buzzing on?
"Bees have their own vocal organs. They don't make sounds by vibrating their wings. " Nie Li said.
In mid-August, at the 18 National Youth Science and Technology Innovation Competition held in Lanzhou, 12-year-old Nie Li wrote a scientific paper "Bees don't need wings to vibrate", and won the Silver Award for Excellent Science and Technology Projects and the Gao Shiqi Special Prize for Popular Science.
This conclusion was reached by Nie Li after observing and testing bees for more than one year.
In the autumn of 200 1, Nie Li learned from the book "Guide to Nature Learning in Primary Schools" that bees, flies, mosquitoes and other insects are dumb. They have no vocal organs, but they have screaming wings. These insects keep flapping their wings at high speed during flight, which makes the air vibrate, thus producing a buzz. Later, Nie Li also saw in "100,000 Why" that the buzz of bees came from the vibration of wings, reaching 200 times per second. If the wings stop vibrating, the sound will stop. She asked the teacher for verification, and the teacher's point of view was the same as that in the book.
Last spring, Nie Li went to a beehive to play, and found that many bees gathered on the beehive, their wings were not flapping, and they were still buzzing. So she questioned the teaching materials, popular science books and teachers' explanations and began experiments and research on bees. First, she glued the bee's wings to the board, and the bee would still make a sound. She cut off the wings of the bees, and she could hear the bees chirping. The two methods were carried out alternately for 42 times, using 48 bees each time. The experimental results show that bees can make sounds without flapping their wings. In order to explore the vocal organs of bees, she glued the bees to the board, looked for them carefully with a magnifying glass and observed them for more than a month. Finally, two black spots smaller than rapeseed were found at the root of bee wings. When the bees buzz, the black spots stir up and down. She pricked the little black spot with a needle, and the bee stopped making noise. She also found some bees. They didn't damage their wings, but just pierced the little black spots and put them into the mosquito net. Bees fly around, and there is no sound anymore. She repeated the experiment 10 times and the results were the same. She wrote this discovery into her paper and thought that the vocal organs of bees were these two small black spots.
It is reported that Nie Li's paper has been included as a collection of winning works by the organizing committee of the competition, and Nie Li's paper has also been published in the Journal of China Education Association and the Professional Committee of Nature Teaching in Primary Schools.
Why is the hive hexagonal?
The place where bees live and breed consists of a nest and a spleen. The space of the nests and spleens in the hive is parallel to each other and perpendicular to the ground, and the distance between the nests and spleens is 7 ~ 10 mm, which is called bee path. Each nest spleen consists of thousands of nests, which are built by worker bees with beeswax secreted by their wax glands. Large and small hexagonal nests are used to cultivate drones and worker bees respectively, and there are three diamond-shaped faces at the bottom. The nest room for cultivating queen bees is called queen bee platform, which looks like drooping peanuts. It is temporarily built by the bees before the bees are divided, mostly in the lower part and corner of the nest spleen. There is an irregular transition nest between the drone house and the worker house, as well as the joint between the nest spleen and the nest frame, which is used to store honey and strengthen the nest spleen.
This time, I will introduce you to the incredible things about bees building nests. Before I
In the "bee class" and other activities held by the company, one asked, "What is the shape of the bee's nest?" The children answered loudly with one voice, "It's hexagonal". Then he asked, "Then why is it a hexagon?" The children all tilted their heads, and some children answered interestingly, "Because bees have six legs." . Some people think that bees actually want to make a cylindrical nest. No one knows what bees think, but it is undoubtedly to make as spacious a space as possible with the least materials. It can be seen that if the honeycomb is round or octagonal, there will be gaps, and if it is triangular or quadrilateral, the area will be reduced, so hexagon is the best of these shapes.
This hexagonal structure is called honeycomb structure. Because this structure is very strong, it is applied to the wings of aircraft and the walls of artificial satellites. Just half of the nests (called nests) inside and outside the hive are staggered from each other, and the intersection point of the sides of the combined hexagon is the center of the hexagon. This is to improve the strength and prevent the bottom of the nest from breaking. In addition, it can be seen from the cross section that the direction of the nests on both sides is upward.
Worker bees feed larvae and store honey and pollen in the hive, and the hive forms an angle of about 9 ~ 14 degrees to prevent honey from flowing out. The ecology of bees and the structure of hives are really amazing, which can be said to be the ingenuity of nature. It can be seen that, regardless of the unknown bee world, from the perspective of beehives, we can know that human intelligence is far less than them in terms of natural creativity. As an insect with excellent sociality, bees have survived and thrived in the past with a longer history than human beings, bringing us many benefits such as honey, royal jelly, propolis, pollen, beeswax and so on. At the beginning of the new century, in the process of making nest frames, the creativity and strangeness of bees make us think deeply.
Although the weather is cold, spring has indeed begun to visit the earth. We strive to finish the preparations when the plum blossoms are in full bloom this year.