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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.
A. J. Cook author of The Bee-Keepers' Guide; or Manual of the Apiary, 1876. [47] Dr. C.C. Miller was one of the first entrepreneurs to make a living from apiculture. By 1878, he made beekeeping his sole business activity. His book, Fifty Years Among the Bees, remains a classic and his influence on bee management persists into the 21st century. [48]
Unlike a bumble bee colony or a paper wasp colony, the life of a honey bee colony is perennial. The three types of honey bees in a hive are: queens (egg-producers), workers (non-reproducing females), and drones (males whose main duty is to find and mate with a queen). Unlike the worker bees, drones do not sting.
The western honey bee or European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most common of the 7–12 species of honey bees worldwide. [3] [4] The genus name Apis is Latin for 'bee', and mellifera is the Latin for 'honey-bearing' or 'honey-carrying', referring to the species' production of honey.
Census data shows that the number of bee colony operations rose much faster than honey production—and is up 160% since 2007. Pollination—not honey—is why the U.S. needs more bees.
Apis laboriosa or Himalayan giant honey bee, is the world's largest honey bee; single adults can measure up to 3.0 cm (1.2 in) in length. Before 1980, Apis laboriosa was considered to be a subspecies of the widespread Apis dorsata , the giant honey bee, but in 1980 and for almost 20 years thereafter it was elevated to the rank of a separate ...
Humans have kept honey bee colonies, commonly in hives, for millennia. [106] Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date to 15,000 years ago; efforts to domesticate them are shown in Egyptian art around 4,500 years ago. [107] Simple hives and smoke were used. [108] [109]
The colony of Apis cerana, a typical honey bee, consists of several thousand female worker bees, one queen bee, and several hundred male drone bees. The colony is constructed inside beeswax combs inside a tree cavity, with a special peanut-shaped structure on the margins of the combs where the queens are reared.