A swarm of bees at Casa Vacanze Podere Santa Pia |  Worker bee
 

   
 
Apis mellifera carnica worker hive entrance 3.jpg

Worker bee [1]
       
   
A swarm of bees at Casa Vacanze Podere Santa Pia |  Worker bee


   
   

Bee colonies

Castes


A colony of bees consists of three castes of bee:

a queen bee, which is normally the only breeding female in the colony;
a large number of female worker bees, typically 30,000–50,000 in number;
a number of male drones, ranging from thousands in a strong hive in spring to very few during dearth or cold season.

The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season, late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying 3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. This would be exceptional however; a prolific queen might peak at 2,000 eggs a day, but a more average queen might lay just 1,500 eggs per day. The queen is raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the production and dissemination of a variety of pheromones or "queen substances". One of these chemicals suppresses the development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and prevents them from laying eggs.

 

YouTube | Bees in the garden - Catching a swarm of bees at Casa Vacanze Podere Santa Pia

 

   
   
 
   
Bienenkoenigin 43a   Bee collecting pollen   Bienen 35b-Detail

Queen bee (center)

 

 

Bee collecting pollen

 

 

Larger drones compared to smaller workers

 

The first hive at Podere Santa Pia

 

Essaim d'abeilles en vol (modifiée).jpg   Essaim d'abeilles posé.JPG  
A swarm about to land  

A swarm attached to a branch

 

 

  How to capture a swarm

Holiday accomodation in Tuscany




Case vacanza in Toscana | Podere Santa Pia



     
Colline sotto Podere Santa Pia
, Giuseppe Ungaretti
Podere Santa Pia
 

 
Colline sotto Podere Santa Pia
   
       

 

 

Mappa Podere Santa Pia | Ingrandire mappa

 


[1] Photo by Richard Bartz, Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, Link. This file is  licensed underthe Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Questo articolo è basato sull' articolo Beekeeping dell' enciclopedia Wikipedia ed è rilasciato sotto i termini della GNU Free Documentation License.