Hi everyone! I’m one of 20,000 types of bees, I’m a honey bee! My scientific name is apis mellifera, cool name, am I right? My species of bees, along with others, is threatened! No thanks to people who spray pesticides on their flowers and/or crops. In the wild we live in hollow trees, unless someone has kindly set out a bee hive for us. I hate to brag, but we honey bees are super cool! We are very civilized and have a tight social order. The females are the workers who collect both pollen and nectar, care for the queen and drones, feed larvae, ventilate the hive, and protect the nest, and many other things. The sad thing is though, we only live 6 weeks. which reminds me! Its almost my 2 week birthday!

Queens are the only ones who can lay fertilized eggs, she can even lay up to 2,000 in ONE DAY! Drones (male honeybees) have only one task, to fertilize young/new queens, shortly after they do, they die. Honey bees also do this cool thing called swarming. When we get overcrowded in a hive, an old queen will leave and take around half the workers with her, while a new queen will stay with the other half. we do this mostly in late spring and early summer, at humid times in the day. Normally when we swarm, we don’t sting people, because we don’t have a nest and larvae to protect, but that doesn’t mean we won’t, because we will protect our queen. Thank you for reading, and learning about me and my hive!

~Beverly Bee