Apiculture (Medical Entrance)

A worker bee is a sterile female bee.

Traditionally, fixed comb hives were used for beekeeping in which the combs could not be removed or manipulated for management or harvesting without permanently damaging the comb.

In apiculture, queens are physically inseminated by drones outside the beehives. Huber was the first to prove by observation and experiment that queens are physically inseminated by drones outside the beehives, usually a great distance away.

Francis Huber is universally regarded as the father of modern bee science and his Nouvelles Observations sur Les Abeilles (or New Observations on Bees) revealed all the basic scientific truths for the biology and ecology of honeybees.

Royal jelly is fed by nurse bees to a larva which is to be made the new queen.

Worker bees produce honey from nectar.

Castoreum is the yellowish secretion of the castor sac. It was fed to bees by medieval beekeepers to increase the honey production.

All worker bees are sterile because of certain pheromones, called queen substances, produced by the queen.

The sole duty of drones is to fertilise the virgin queen. At the time of mating flight, the drones follow the queen, copulate and die after copulation.

Nosema apis is a microsporidian that invades the intestinal tracts of adult bees and causes nosema disease, also known as nosemosis. Nosema infection is also associated with black queen cell virus. It is normally only a problem when the bees cannot leave the hive to eliminate waste.

The lifespan of a worker bee is about 6 weeks.

Queen bee mates once in a lifetime. It stores millions of sperms in its body and uses them for producing eggs throughout its life.

The behaviour of honey bees to come out of the hive in large numbers is called swarming. It takes place during the spring or early summer. It relieves the over-crowding and provides a means of colony reproduction, i.e. founding of new colonies.

In India, the commonly domesticated species are Apis mellifera and Apis indica.

Apis cerana indica is known as the eastern honeybee.