Busy as a Bee

The days have been warmer lately, and the ladies are getting busy. The front of the hive has 100+ bees flying around getting familiar with their home. This helps them later identify it when they are returning with a full load of food and supplies.

Each worker bee lives for about 45 days, except for the queen who can live 5 years. During their short lives they perform in a number of roles. Starting with care of the nursery and larva when the worker is still young and relatively sterile because she has never left the hive. A worker might check on a single larvae 1600 times in a day.

I went outside today and sat about 15 feet away on a towel and watched. They were not interested in me at all, I guess the infatuation is not reciprocal. Some bees would come out and start hovering around the entrance moving in progressively larger circles. They are imprinting the hive into their memory so they can find it more easily. Then as they move progressively further away, they are searching for flowers and water.

Other bees would simply exit the hive and dart off into one direction or another. They had a half-dozen or so routes they would follow to different flower sources. When traveling a route, they fly very fast and straight. This is quite different from the wandering circles. I counted an average of 10 bees a minute traveling outbound on a single path. They were outbound. Following them lead me to a tree completely covered with white flowers in my neighbors yard. The path from the hive to the tree is, quite literally, a beeline.