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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 .
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.
Throughout history apiaries and bees have been kept for honey and pollination purposes all across the globe. Due to the definition of apiary as a location where hives are kept its history can be traced as far back as that of beekeeping itself. In recent years Colony Collapse Disorder due to pesticide resistant mites have ravaged bee populations ...
Bee bread – the main source of food for most honey bees and their larvae; Beekeeper – also called apiarist or apiculturist, a person who cares for bees; Bee learning and communication; Bee museums; Bee sting; Bee venom therapy – also called apitherapy; Beehive – a housing for cavity-dwelling bees that allows inspection and honey removal
Young worker bees, sometimes called "nurse bees", clean the hive and feed the larvae. When their royal jelly-producing glands begin to atrophy, they begin building comb cells. They progress to other within-colony tasks as they become older, such as receiving nectar and pollen from foragers, and guarding the hive.