Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The queen bee's abdomen is longer than the worker bees surrounding her and also longer than a male bee's. Even so, in a hive of 60,000 to 80,000 honey bees, it is often difficult for beekeepers to find the queen with any speed; for this reason, many queens in non-feral colonies are marked with a light daub of paint on their thorax. [ 13 ]
O. lignara bees, like many insects, can select the gender of the egg they lay by fertilizing the egg, or not. Unfertilized eggs are males, while fertilized eggs are females. The adult bee lays female eggs in the back of the burrow, and the male eggs towards the front. On average, she lays about three males and one to two females per cavity.
Bees in four tribes of the family Apidae, subfamily Apinae have corbiculae: the honey bees, bumblebees, stingless bees, and orchid bees. [14] [15] The corbicula is a polished cavity surrounded by a fringe of hairs, into which the bee collects the pollen; most other bees possess a structure called the scopa, which is similar in function, but is a dense mass of branched hairs into which pollen ...
Female X. virginica. The bee is similar in size to bumblebees, but has a glossy, mostly black body with a slight metallic purple tint. [4] X. virginica males and females have generally the same mass, but can be differentiated visually by the male's longer body and the female's wider head.
Unlike true honey bees, whose female bees may become workers or queens strictly depending on what kind of food they receive as larvae (queens are fed royal jelly and workers are fed pollen), the caste system in meliponines is variable, and commonly based simply on the amount of pollen consumed; larger amounts of pollen yield queens in the genus ...
Abdominal Scopa: Look for an abdominal scopa (a specialized brush of hairs) on the underside of the abdomen. Grooves on T2-T4: Deep grooves on tergites T2 to T4 are another identifying feature. Lip on T6: The last visible segment (T6) in a female has a distinct turned-up lip at the very end of the bee. [9] Comparison with Similar Species:
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]
Mason bee is a name now commonly used for species of bees in the genus Osmia, of the family Megachilidae.Mason bees are named for their habit of using mud or other "masonry" products in constructing their nests, which are made in naturally occurring gaps such as between cracks in stones or other small dark cavities.