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Biological characteristics of bees and their relationship with human beings

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Introduce you to bees.

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Which comes first, flowers or bees?

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What if all the bees on the earth die?

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bee

More meanings of Insecta

Bee (Bee/Honey bee) belongs to the general name of HYMENOPTERA, LEPIDOPTERA, Spoturoidea, Apiidae and is an important group of HYMENOPTERA in insect taxonomy. According to fossil data, a large number of bees have been found in the late Eocene strata of Tertiary, and many species of APIs have great economic value and are closely related to human life. There are records of bees and their uses in ancient China. Many kinds of products or behaviors are closely related to medicine (such as honey, royal jelly and bee venom), agriculture (such as crop pollination) and industry (such as beeswax and propolis). They are called resource insects. The most familiar ones are Italian bees and oriental bees, which are domesticated artificially to make honey.

Bees are generally 7-20 mm long, yellowish brown or dark brown, with dense hair; The head is almost as wide as the chest; The waist is thinner than the chest and abdomen; The antenna is knee-shaped, the compound eye is oval, the mouthparts are chewing and sucking, and the hind feet are powder-carrying feet; Two pairs of membrane wings, the front wing is big and the rear wing is small, and the front and rear wings are connected by wing hooks; The abdomen is nearly oval, with less body hair than the chest and claws at the end of the abdomen. They are called resource insects. Adult bees are about 2 cm to 4 cm long (about 0.8 ~ 1.6 inch).

There are three kinds of bees, one is in a tree; One kind used by people with utensils is the domestic bee, which is small in size, yellowish and rich in sweet honey; There is a kind of bee, which nests in a high and steep place on the rock, called Shimi. This kind of bee is as black as a gadfly, and its honey tastes sour and red.

Bees live entirely on flowers, including pollen and nectar, sometimes brewed and stored as honey. There is no doubt that bees are pollinating it as well as collecting pollen. When bees collect pollen between flowers, they will drop some pollen on the flowers. These fallen pollen are very important because it often causes cross-pollination of plants. The actual value of bees as pollinators is greater than the value of making honey and beeswax.

Drones usually have a short life span, do not collect pollen and are not responsible for feeding young bees. Worker bees are responsible for all the work of nesting and storing food, and usually have special structures to carry pollen. Most bees collect pollen from all kinds of flowers, but some bees only collect pollen from flowers of certain families, some bees only collect pollen from flowers of certain colors, and some bees only collect pollen from related flowers. Bee's mouth is a tool for collecting and carrying pollen, which seems to be able to adapt to different kinds of flowers. Bees make sounds because they have vocal organs, which are located in two small black spots on the abdomen of bees.

Growth and reproduction

Related overview

The virgin queen bee (female) keeps her sperm in her body for several years after mating with the male peak. The queen bee is free to choose fertilized eggs or unfertilized eggs.

There are three kinds of beehives. The smallest is the worker bee house (horizontal ground), the diameter of the unmanned machine room is larger than that of the worker bee house 1mm, and the largest is the queen bee house. Usually, when the queen bee is cultivated, the worker bees begin to make a queen's room at the bottom of the hive, facing down (vertical to the ground).

The queen bee gives birth to unfertilized eggs in the drone room and develops into a drone (parthenogenesis).

The queen bee produces fertilized eggs in the worker bee house and the queen bee house, and develops into worker bees and queen bees.

All bee larvae were fed with royal jelly for the first 3 days, and worker and drone larvae were fed with honey and pollen after 3 days. Only the larvae in the queen bee's room have been fed with royal jelly and developed into queen bees.

Mating process

The mating process of bees is very tragic. 7~ 17 drones take turns mating with the queen bee. The body structure of the drone can generate huge air pressure to spray sperm, and even make sounds that can be heard by human ears. After mating, drones will die because their reproductive organs are torn. For them, mating is the whole meaning of life.

Living habits

Bees live in groups. There are three types of bee colony: queen bee, worker bee and drone. There is a queen bee (there are two queens in some special cases), 1, 000 to 1, 500 worker bees, 500 to 1, 500 drones. In order to get food, bees keep working, collecting honey during the day, making honey at night and pollinating fruit trees, which is an important medium for crop pollination.

The queen bee lays eggs in the nest room and the larvae live in the nest room. Larvae living in groups are fed by worker bees, while those living alone feed on female bees and are stored in bee bread in the nest room. When the bee bread eats them up, the larvae mature and pupate, and emerge from the cocoon when they emerge. Domestic bees breed several generations a year, and wild bees breed 1 ~ 3 generations a year. Overwintering with mature larvae, pupae or adults.

Generally, males appear earlier than females, with short life span, and do not undertake the tasks of nesting, storing bee bread and raising offspring. Female bees build nests, collect pollen and nectar, and store them in the nest room. Their life span is longer than that of male bees.

In the bee society, they still live a matriarchal clan life. Bees undergo four morphological changes: eggs, larvae, pupae and adults. Among the members of their big family, there is a queen bee (queen bee), a female bee with reproductive ability, responsible for laying eggs and reproducing, and at the same time "ruling" this big family. Although the queen bee has mated, her eggs are not all fertilized. It can give birth to fertilized eggs according to the needs of large families, and worker bees will develop into female bees (sterile worker bees) after being fed with pollen and honey for 2 1 day. You can also give birth to unfertilized eggs and develop into drones after 24 days. When the extended family members of this group multiply too much, resulting in crowding, they should be grouped. The process of grouping is as follows: worker bees make a special hive-Wangtai, where queen bees give birth to fertilized eggs; After the larvae hatch, worker bees are given special treatment and fed with highly nutritious royal jelly made in the body. 16 days later, the larva developed into an adult and became a new queen bee with reproductive ability. The old queen bee led some worker bees to fly to form a new bee colony. Oriental bee. China bee A and Italian bee A. mellifera L. are both beneficial insects that are generally raised. In the breeding process, the new queen bee will be grouped manually after birth, otherwise a queen bee will lead a group of worker bees to leave the hive and fly away, thus losing the productivity of the bee colony. Bees fly at a speed of 20-40 km/h, with an altitude of 1 km, and the effective range of activities is within 2.5 km from the nest. All bees feed on pollen and nectar, and collecting nectar is a very hard work. Only by interviewing 1 100- 1446 flowers can bees get 1 nectar. During the honey flow, 1 bee collects 10 times a day on average, and the amount of nectar carried each time is half of its body weight. Nectar is sucked into the honey sac by bees and mixed with invertase, the secretion of mandibular gland, and the transformation of sucrose begins. After repeated brewing of honey juice, continuous fan blowing, the water is evaporated, and the conversion and concentration are accelerated until the honey is completely mature. According to different species, the number of worker bees generally ranges from 12 to more than 50000. They collect nectar and pollen, and if they are bees, they will also send them to specific places, which is obtained by dancing a particularly strict dance. Their duties include making honey, making wax beehives for storing food and living larvae, and taking care of bees and queen bees and keeping the beehives expanding. Bees are a perennial group, and will constantly raise new queen bees. The old queen bee will leave the hive with a group of worker bees and go elsewhere to rebuild her home.

There are many drones, and a group may be nearly a thousand. The only duty of the drone is to mate with the queen bee. When mating, the queen bee flies out of the nest, and the whole group of drones chases after it. It's called marital escape. The queen bee's marriage and mate selection are carried out through flight competitions, and only the winner can become a spouse. After mating, the drone's genitals fall off in the queen's genitals. At this time, the drone has completed its lifelong mission and died. After the males who failed to mate with the queen bee returned to the nest, they could only eat and drink, but could not collect honey, and became redundant "lazy people" in the bee colony. However, these unmanned opportunities kept flapping their wings in the hive, inadvertently maintaining the temperature in the hive. But after a long time, worker bees will deport them. Beekeepers don't want to keep too many drones in the bee colony and consume honey, so they are artificially eliminated. From this point of view, worker bees have the largest number in this group. The number of worker bees kept by beekeepers in a colony varies with seasons, generally 2 1500 worker bees. Worker bees are the most industrious. The song "Little bees are busy all day, picking flowers and making honey" only refers to worker bees. In addition to collecting powder to make honey, building nests, feeding larvae, cleaning the environment and defending bees. It is also the task of worker bees. From spring to late autumn, bees are busy every day during flowering. Winter is the only short leisure time for bees. However, the cold weather and the low temperature in the hive are not good for bees, because bees are warm animals, and their body temperature changes with the temperature of the surrounding environment. The clever little bee came up with a special way to resist the cold. When the temperature in the hive is as low as 65438 03℃, they are close to each other in the hive and form spherical clusters. The lower the temperature, the closer the colony is, which reduces the surface area and increases the density of bee colony to prevent excessive cooling. According to the measurement, in the coldest time, the temperature in the bee ball can still be maintained at around 24℃. At the same time, they also use more honey and exercise to generate heat to raise the temperature in the hive. In cold weather, the surface temperature of the bee ball is lower than the center of the ball. At this time, the bees on the surface of the bee ball drill to the center of the ball, while the bees in the center of the ball move outward. They took care of each other, changed places repeatedly and spent the cold winter. How do they eat honey stored in beehives during wintering and balling? Smart bees have their own tricks. They don't need to break up the spheres and climb out to eat separately, but pass them on to each other to get food. In this way, the temperature in the ball can be kept constant or changed little, which is conducive to safe wintering. Beekeepers artificially produce royal jelly. In fact, they artificially made some queen bee platforms and put them in beehives for the queen bee to lay eggs. When young bees hatch and worker bees feed them with royal jelly, beekeepers will take out the royal jelly. This technology is actually a kind of deception, which shows that even smart bees are deceived sometimes. [3]

Feed food

Bees feed on plant pollen and nectar. Eating habits can be divided into three categories.

1 eat more. That is, pollen and nectar. Ruyi bees and Chinese bees feed on plants of different families or flowers of a certain color (not limited to plant species).

2 lack of food. That is to eat the flowers of related families and genera, such as alfalfa quasi-bees.

3 partial eclipse. In other words, it only feeds on certain plants or related species, such as cornflower bees. The flowers interviewed by various bees are closely related to the length of mouthparts: for example, species with short mouthparts such as Labiatae, Aphidae and Aphidae interview the open flowers of Rosaceae, Cruciferae, Umbelliferae and Ranunculaceae; However, due to the long mouthparts, sawflies, honeybees and other species use deep flower tubes to interview flowers, such as Leguminosae and Labiatae.

Species habit

parasitic

Female bees don't build nests, but lay eggs in the host's nest. Larvae generally has a large head and upper jaw, which is used to destroy the eggs or larvae of the host.

The nesting instinct of bees is complex, and the nesting place, time and nest structure are diverse. The nesting time is usually in the flowering period of plants. According to the nesting site and the texture of the nest, it can be divided into the following categories:

① The types of social life take their own wax as spleen, such as bees, stingless bees and wheat bees. The nest room is hexagonal.

② There are the most kinds of nests in the soil, and the interior of the nest room is coated with a mixture of wax and saliva to keep the humidity of the nest room.

(3) The ways of using plant tissues to build nests are more diverse. For example, LEPIDOPTERA can roll plant leaves into tubes to form nests and put them in natural cavities; Mylabris uses plant hair to make wart nests on the stems; Lupine and LEPIDOPTERA insects nest on the stems of dead plants; Some kinds of bumblebees nest under the litter of the forest; Wood wasps drill holes in wood to build nests, and so on.

(4) Others, for example, the genus Myzus uses saliva to adhere to small sandstone to build nests, and the genus Myzus builds nests in the shell of slugs.

sociality

Females and drones live in the same nest, but there are differences in morphology, physiology and division of labor. Female individuals are larger and specialize in spawning and reproduction, while male individuals are smaller than female individuals and specialize in mating and die after mating; Worker bees are small female bees with genital hypoplasia. They specialize in nesting, collecting food, feeding larvae, cleaning the nest room and adjusting the humidity of the nest. Italian bees and China bees are social species. Besides, there are bumblebees, tropical stingless bees and wheat bees.

Intergroup relationship

Although bees live in groups, there is no collusion between bees. There is a lot of feed in the beehive. In order to prevent the invasion of other bees and other insects and animals, bees have formed the ability to guard the hive. Needles are the main self-defense organs of bees.

Bees have a keen sense of smell, and they can identify other groups of bees according to their smells. Bees are often guarded at the door of the nest to prevent bees from other groups from sneaking into the nest casually. When the honey source is insufficient, there are often bees from non-self groups sneaking into the nest to steal honey, and the guardian bees immediately take up the battle. But outside the hive, the situation is different, for example, in the flowers or drinking water, different bees are together, not hostile and not interfering with each other.

Female bees that fly out of mating sometimes stray into other groups. At this time, the worker bees immediately gathered around and assassinated the female bees.

If the drone strays into the outer group, the situation will be different if the worker bees don't hurt it, because bees breed drones not only for the needs of their own group, but also for the survival of their race.

Relationship with people

economic meaning

Bees are one of the insect groups beneficial to human beings, generally referring to the production of bee species: western bees and Chinese bees. It pollinates crops, fruit trees, vegetables, grasses, camellia oleifera crops and traditional Chinese medicine plants.

Honey: It is a nutritious natural nourishing food and one of the most commonly used tonics. According to analysis, it contains a variety of inorganic salts, vitamins, iron, calcium, copper, manganese, potassium, phosphorus and other organic acids and trace elements beneficial to human health. It is a tonic commonly used by people and has the reputation of "milk for the elderly". Royal jelly is a kind of advanced nutrition, which can not only enhance physical fitness and prolong life, but also treat chronic diseases such as neurasthenia, anemia and gastric ulcer.

Bee pollen, known as the "mini-nutrition bank", can be eaten directly, or it can be dried in different shades and soaked in cold water as a drink.

Beeswax and propolis: both raw materials of light industry. Propolis, also known as Zijin, can't produce gold in the world.

Bee venom: effective for rheumatism and neuritis. Hold the worker bee with a clamp, nail the patient's acupoint with its tail needle, and let the bee venom enter the body to achieve a certain therapeutic effect. Bees not only provide people with honey, royal jelly, bee venom and beeswax, but also pollinate various crops to increase production. 13 of human food is directly or indirectly pollinated by insects, and 80% of this 1/3 is pollinated by bees. Bees are the most ideal pollinators of various crops and are known as "wings of agriculture".

Because of the particularity of the morphological structure of bees, bees can become the most ideal and important pollinators among many pollinators. Bees have a long tongue tube (kiss), and at the same time, they have ingenious flower drawing, pollen comb, pollen rake and pollen basket, which can adapt to the flower picking of various crops without hurting flowers. Bees have hair all over their bodies, and some of them have feathers, which is convenient for pollen adhesion. A bee can carry up to 5 million pollen every day and collect thousands of flowers, and its pollination efficiency can be imagined. Bees are special in picking flowers. Every time they leave the nest, they only collect nectar and pollen from the same plant. Bee is a social insect, and there are as many as 50,000-65,438+10,000 bees in a group. Can be bred in large quantities, so that people can pollinate crops and fruit trees that bloom in large areas in a planned way, and achieve the purpose of increasing production in large areas.

Honey collection

Bee farmers (commonly known as beekeepers) are a kind of hard-working farmers with low income. They need to sleep in the wind and sleep all year round. There are about 6-7 million bees in China, including 200,000-300,000 beekeepers and 50,000-60,000 people engaged in the processing of bee products. A beekeeper's "standard configuration" is 50 boxes of bees. According to the average of 20 thousand bees per box, a beekeeper has to take care of millions of people. The industry of beekeeping is highly mobile, so most beekeepers have to chase the flowering period and switch to beekeeping. In China, there are two main transit routes for beekeepers: one is the northeast line, which goes north from the coast of Hainan, passes through Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Shandong to Heilongjiang, and then turns back to the south from Hubei and Hunan; The second is the northwest line, from Yunnan to Sichuan to Shaanxi, Qinghai, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang; From February to May every year, beekeepers and bees are busy in all rapeseed producing areas in China and even in the world.

Bee farmers are mostly semi-experts and must be highly involved in bee life. Their daily work includes shaking honey, keeping bees, cultivating queen bees, separating too powerful bees, collecting royal jelly, collecting pollen and so on. You need to check the beehive at 6 o'clock every morning to see if there are any natural enemies of bees such as wasps and toads; In addition, it is necessary to exchange the nest spleen frequently, transfer the nest spleen with larvae to the upper part of the hive and the empty nest spleen to the lower part for the queen bee to lay eggs; Then you can collect royal jelly, roughly once every three days, and a group of bees can produce 5- 10 kg of royal jelly a year. Honey is usually shaken in the afternoon, and a box of bees can be shaken once every two days in sunny days. For beekeepers, the biggest natural disaster is cold and rainy days. On rainy days, bees can't collect powder, but they can eat honey at first, and then they may starve to death in large numbers. At this time, beekeepers need to feed with white sugar. China's beekeeping industry has great development potential, and the current beekeeping density is less than 20% of that of European countries. According to the experiment of USDA, the pollination behavior of bees can increase the yield of agricultural products by 30-40%, up to 80%, among which drones have the best pollination effect on greenhouse plants. It can be said that the output value of agricultural products increased by bee pollination is 60-80 times that of beekeeping itself.

Honey is an active substance, which is not easy to preserve, so beekeepers usually adopt the mode of hoarding and selling. If they need good quality honey, they'd better buy it directly from familiar beekeepers. The price of different kinds of honey also varies greatly. The best first-class honey comes from litchi, citrus, linden, Sophora japonica, Chinese milk vetch and Vitex negundo, and rape is the second-class honey. In terms of output, the annual output of honey in China is about 200,000-300,000 tons, half of which is used for export. Among them, the yield of rape nectar is the highest, accounting for about 25-30%. Domestic honey sales are 600,000-700,000 tons per year. In other words, some honey sold in China is not real honey. In the production of royal jelly, rape nectar accounts for half; Because royal jelly is a necessary food to maintain the survival of queen bees, the output is relatively small, and many beekeepers do not sell royal jelly. Pure royal jelly is very thick and has a special taste, which makes people's stomach difficult to adapt (diarrhea) and is rarely eaten directly; Most royal jelly on the market is mixed with honey many times. The so-called "royal jelly" (market product) mixed with royal jelly and honey in a ratio of 3: 7 is already very good, and the ratio is generally lower. Generally speaking, honey, especially honey purchased directly from beekeepers, is likely to be inconsistent in color and precipitation. Be careful if the packaging is exquisite, the color and appearance are uniform, and the price is extremely low (below 10 yuan/kg).