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Painted wooden beehives with active honey bees A honeycomb created inside a wooden beehive. A beehive is an enclosed structure where some honey bee species of the subgenus Apis live and raise their young. Though the word beehive is used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature distinguishes nest from hive.
Beekeeping (or apiculture) is the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives. Honey bees in the genus Apis are the most commonly kept species but other honey producing bees such as Melipona stingless bees are also kept.
While some colonies live in hives provided by humans, so-called "wild" colonies (although all honey bees remain wild, even when cultivated and managed by humans) typically prefer a nest site that is clean, dry, protected from the weather, about 20 litres (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 US gal) in volume with a 4–6 cm 2 (0.62–0.93 sq in) entrance about 3 ...
Western honey bee colonies reproduce through a process called "swarming". [ 14 ] In most climates, western honey bees swarm in the spring and early summer, when there is an abundance of blooming flowers from which to collect nectar and pollen .
[58] [59] Colony collapses were called "May Disease" in Colorado in 1891 and 1896. [60] Starting in the first decade of the 21st century, abnormally high die-offs (30–70% of hives) of western honey bee colonies have occurred in North America. This has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder" (CCD) and was at first unexplained. [61]
A nucleus colony can be combined with the larger colony to re-queen it with a much smaller break in brood rearing. The terms 'nuc' and 'split' are not strictly interchangeable. While a nuc may have a number of different uses, a split more often refers to dividing a colony for the purposes of growing the removed bees back to a full-sized colony.
Swarming is a honey bee colony's natural means of reproduction.In the process of swarming, a single colony splits into two or more distinct colonies. [1]Swarming is mainly a spring phenomenon, usually within a two- or three-week period depending on the locale, but occasional swarms can happen throughout the producing season.
Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea. They are currently considered a clade, called Anthophila. [1]