14.+Arthropoda+-insecta+-+hymenoptera

Arthropoda -insecta - hymenoptera Isabel Brack //Apis mellifera// Common name: Honey Bee

1. Classification/Diagnostic characteristics There are twenty six subspecies of the //Apis mellifera//, commonly known as the honey bee, which are distinguished from each other by their morphology, which is their form and structure, by their habitat and environmental preferences and their ability to produce honey under various environmental conditions such as increased or decreased temperature. The honey bee typically has two pairs of wings and has antennae with ten or more segments that are often longer than the head. The female honey bee has an ovipositor, which is an organ at the end of a female insect used to deposit eggs and which is in the case of female worker bees modified to be a potent stinger. The body of the honey bee has three main parts: the head, the thorax (the middle section to which the six legs and two pairs of wings are attached) and the abdomen (tail). The thorax of the honey bee itself has three segments and is connected to the abdomen by a very thin waist. The order //hymenoptera// to which the //Apis mellifera// belongs is classified by insects having heavy wings and which undergo complete metamorphosis (including the four states: egg, larva, pupa and adult) and the order //hymenoptera// is one of the larger orders of insects and includes bees, wasps, and ants (10), (16).


 * //(11) Size and shape comparison of worker, drone and queen bees//**

//**(12) Worker bee gathering pollen and nectar**//

2. Relationship to humans Honey bees pollinate a significant variety of flowering plants and trees, including crops upon which humans rely for food for themselves and their livestock, and thus are extremely important to human life. As with all insects, humans also play a role in dispersing honey bees and all other members of the order //hymenoptera// around the Earth, both intentionally or unintentionally. Honey bees in the United States originate primarily from the original European honey bee that was transported to the United States with the original European settlers are an established component of the United States’ agricultural system. Honey bees pollinate more than 30% of the food consumed by humans, and in the United States it is estimated that honey bees pollinate up to $15 billion worth of crops each year. In addition to providing pollination services, honey bees also produce other products that people use including honey, pollen, wax, royal jelly, and propolis (bee glue made from a sticky resin produced by the honey bee). Unfortunately, the use of herbicides and pesticides by humans, particularly in the United States, has caused a significant decline in the honey bee population. Conservation efforts are underway by humans to change farming practices to eliminate harmful pesticides and herbicides and to re-establish honey bee populations (1), (4), (16).

3. Habitat and niche The habitats that a honey bee can occupy are expansive ranging from temperate forests, shrublands and grasslands where the honey bee's source of food, flowering plants and trees, are abundant. While the honey bee prefers these habitats and are more abundant in them, they can survive in more difficult habitats such as deserts, savannah, and wetlands as long as there is a sufficient supply of food (flowering plants) and water. Originally, honey bees ranged throughout their native territory of Europe, western Asia, and Africa. Due to centuries of human activity and migration, today the honey bee is found on all continents across the globe with the exception of Antarctica. The honey bee's niche, or its role and how it fits into its particular environment, is that of a superior pollinator of flowering plants and trees and a producer honey, a staple food source for humans and other animals. Honey bees usually require a hollow cavity, such as a dead tree, in which to build their hives (nests) to live in. The hive must be within the honey bee's flying range (ideally less than a kilometer) near good sources of pollen and nectar. Recognizing the value of honey bees for their honey and pollination, through out human history humans have been building structures for honey bees to build their hives in. In England and Europe these are known as "Bee Boles" which can date back to 1100 A.D. and today humans build many different structures of man made bee hives to attract and keep bees for their pollenating and honey. To build their nests, worker bees make the walls and interior structure of the hives by chewing the flakes of wax produced by special glands in their abdomens until the wax becomes soft, and then form the wax into a hexagonal structure of cells called "honeycomb" where the bee larvae is housed, the pollen gathered by the bees and honey produced by the honey bee is stored (2), (16), (17).

//**(7)Honey bee niche - collecting pollen and making honey**//

//**(6) Global Map of honey bee range of habitats**//

4. Predator avoidance Honey bees primarily avoid predators by building their hives in protected structures such as hollowed out tree hives and sealing the opening to the hive with a protective wax and resin mixture called propolis. Another method of predator avoidance and survival is the adaptation of the bee of living in very large colonies in the hive, thus protecting some of the hive members through the sheer number of individuals. In addition, the worker bee has a barbed stinger which is not common among stinging insects and which embeds the stinger in the victim. While this causes the death of the worker by pulling out its abdomen, it is also very painful for the predator. The stinger of the honey bee is not the only defense mechanism, as the bee's exoskeletons also provide some protection from certain smaller predators. One of the main methods of predator avoidance is through the social and group behavior of the honey bee. For example, when the honey bee is threatened by a predatory hornet, the honey bee cannot sting the hornet due to its hard cuticles. To combat the hornet, the honey bees try to latch onto it using their front legs and mandibles and trap the hornet in a dense ball of honey bees, killing it with the high core temperature of the honey bee ball. The honey bee will also swarm a predator with thousands of individual bees attacking and stinging the predator (3), (14).

5. Nutrient acquisition Honey bees live on pollen, nectar and the honey they make from those two plant products. Worker bees collect pollen with their legs by rubbing up against flowers and storing it on their hind legs and they collect nectar from flowers with their proboscis, storing it in their crop (part of their stomach). The water is extracted from the nectar by special enzymes in the honey bee's crop. When the worker bees return to the hive, the nectar is sucked out of the crop by other worker bees who chew the nectar for half an hour. While chewing, these bees release enzymes that break down the nectar to form a simple syrup. The final syrup is deposited inside the cells of the honeycomb where it is fanned by the beating wings of the bees which evaporates the honey further, thickening it. After the honey is produced, the bees seal the honeycomb containing the honey with excreted bees wax and then retrieve the honey when needed for food during periods when the flower pollen and nectar is not available. Worker bees actually produce food from special glands in their head known as "worker jelly" which is fed to the larvae (13), (16).

6. Reproduction and life cycle //Hymenoptera// are eusocial, meaning that their colonies include non-reproductive members (worker bees and drones) and that they have a highly structured society formed around the queen. In the honey bee colony, the queen is the single reproductive female who produces a few male offspring, but most of her offspring are non-reproductive female worker bees. The queen engages in one mating flight where she copulates with a single reproductive male bee. She then contains a lifetime supply of sperm. She controls which eggs are fertilized and develop into a female bee and which are not fertilized and develop a male bee. Whether a larvae grows into a queen, worker bee or drone depends upon the days of development of the bee. The queen honey bee will live for two to four years, while the worker bee will only live a few weeks and the male bee only a month or two. The queen honey bee will lay up to 1,000 eggs in a day and can lay up to 200,000 eggs in a lifetime (4).

While individual bees have a life cycle, the colony or hive does as well. A typical hive can have at its peak between 40,000 to 80,000 individual bees. As a hive gets either too large or as the queen bee reaches the later stages of her life, some of the individuals will split off to form a new hive in a process called swarming. Prior to the swarming, worker bees will tend to several emerging queen larvae. Prior to the larvae hatching, the old queen will group up with a large number of worker bees into a swarm and fly off to establish other hive. Later as the new queens emerge, they fight with each other until one is left as the survivor who begins laying her own eggs to repopulate the hive (4).

7. Growth and development Honey bees undergo complete metamorphosis through four stages of growth and development. The first stage of development is the egg stage when the queen lays the egg into the protective honeycomb structure of the hive which, depending upon temperature, hatch within 1-4 days. The second stage of metamorphosis is the larval stage where the honey bee grub remains in the wax cell within the hive while being fed by the worker bees. The female grub will develop into either a queen or a worker depending upon which food is fed to it. The development time of the larvae varies for workers, queens and males. The third stage of development begins with the wax cell containing the grub being sealed by the workers, after which the larva undergoes molting, forming a cocoon. Once the cocoon is formed, the fourth and last stage of development occurs, the pupa stage, during which the honey bee completes its metamorphosis which is quite significant and eats its way out of the wax cell, emerging into the hive as an adult (4).

8. Integument (outer protective layer) Honey bees have an exoskeleton which is made of chitin, a polymer of glucose, and covered with wax layers, protecting the bee's bodies from some damage, water and dehydration (4), (16).

9. Movement As a member of the phylum //arthropoda//, honey bees possess segmented bodies with muscles attached to the different segments. They also have jointed appendages. The combination of jointed appendages and segmented bodies allow them to engage in complex movement with improved control as well as to engage in specialized tasks. Honey bees fly with the aid of their two sets of wings, the larger fore wings and smaller hind wings. Both sets of wings help with flight, but the bee's lift actually occurs because of a unique twisting motion of the wings during the up and down strokes that is similar to a propeller. Another unique movement of the bee is that worker bees tasked with gathering nectar and pollen will perform sophisticated dance-like motions to communicate the location of flowers to the other bees (19).

10. Sensing the environment Bees possess a delicate sense of touch throughout their body and this is particularly true in their antennae which are used for sensing smell, taste, touch and even some hearing. The //Apis mellifera// has a much better sense of smell than taste. They have been found to have around 170 odorant receptors, compared to only 10 gustatory receptors. The study of these chemoreceptors has also helped to determine how a honey bee senses its environment. The odorant receptors, responsible for improving the honeybee's olfactory senses, help the honeybee sense pheromones surrounding it, which contributes to the social climate and activity of the hive. In addition, the odorant receptors help the honeybees sense their kin around them. The lack of gustatory receptors can be explained by the fact that bees have a mutualistic relationship with plants. Plants don't make toxins to try and poison bees, so the Apis mellifera does not need taste sensors to detect poison. Honey bees also have two sets of eyes, simple and compound. The compound eye contains several individual eyes which transmit a unique image to the brain where the bee assembles the multiple images into one composite image. The compound eyes allow the bee to see in polarized light, protecting the bee from the damaging effects of daylight and allowing the bee to navigate in daylight (15).

11. Gas exchange A bee's body is covered with small openings called spiracle (like a human pore), which can be opened or closed by valves. These openings are connected to air sacs, which can expand and contract, and which then lead to tubes called tracheoles [|1] (3)Oxygen enters the honey bee's spiracle, then travels down to the tracheoles where the terminal tips (fluid-filled) allow gas to move in a liquid medium. The gas then travels across the tracheolar walls and then across the plasma membranes of the cells, finally through the cytoplasm to the mitochondria. This process is reversed with carbon dioxide (8), (18).

12. Waste removal The honey bee does not separate its waste streams into solid and liquid wastes, but rather must process those wastes together. To do this, the honey bee passes food into its stomach (the ventriculus) where it is digested and passed to the ileum, the bee's small intestine. At the intersection of the ileum and ventriculus are the malpighian tubules which function like the kidneys of the bee by filtering the bee's waste, recycling the fluid back to the ileum and making it possible for the honey bee to excrete solid waste while retaining as much water as possible (4), (16), (18).

13. Environmental physiology (temperature, water, and salt regulation) Honey bees need to maintain an internal body temperature of about 95 degrees Fahrenheit in order to fly. Thus, generally the honey bee lives in temperate environments where their food sources (flowering plants) are abundant enough to sustain them and the temperatures during the growing season are moderately warm (60 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit). The honey bee can maintain its internal temperature while flying by regulating the temperature of its flying muscles and controlling its wing speed. The honey bee also relies significantly on the colony in the hive to maintain individual body temperatures by clustering together in a tight ball and creating thermal heat through individual's movements. It is this process that allows honey bee colonies to survive over the winter with the honey bees relying on the stored food sources of honey for energy to maintain homeostasis (4), (16), (20).

14. Internal circulation //Hymenoptera// have open circulatory systems meaning that the circulatory fluid flows exits the circulatory system vessels and circulates throughout the body's tissues and cells. The circulatory fluid then returns to the vessels of the circulatory system (18).

15. Chemical control (i.e. endocrine system) Possessing three endocrine glands, honey bees use hormones to signal and regulate growth and development through six molts in the pupal and larval stages of life. First, the prothoracic gland sits between the first two segment of the bee's body, functioning as the manufacturer and secretor of ecdysone, the hormone the initiates molts. Second, the corpora cardiaca sits on the aorta as two globular regions, closer to the brain than the other two glands; although, it's function is not quite clear. Third, the corpora allata works as the regulator of Juvenile Hormone (JH) that fluctuates in its levels in the blood, serving as the first step for triggering a molt when falling to certain levels. The balance of ecdysone and JH levels plan out the life history of a honey bee as it moves from infancy to adulthood, eventually specializing according to when it JH levels reach its lowest. For instance, queen bees reaches its peak JH levels earlier than other bees castes and keeps them relatively low through the rest of its life (5), (18).


 * (9) Cross Section of Honey Bee's Head Showing Corpora cadiaca and Corpora allata**

1. After reading the above information, in what ways are honey bees related to human and describe how humans and honey bees are fundamentally interrelated? - The two organisms are deeply related to one another. Because the honey bees carry pollen from one plant to the flower of another, they are essential to the life of humans by fertilizing many of the plants that humans depend on as food sources for themselves or for livestock. Without the honey bee it is likely that the human race would be presented with a significant challenges in obtaining and maintaining food sources. Sadly, the use of herbicides and pesticides by humans is significantly impacting the honey bee, threating its survival and causing increasing harm to the environment and to humans (1), (4), (16).
 * Review Questions:**

2. What are the similarities, if any, between the growth and development of the honey bee and human growth and development? - The process of growth and development in honey bees is directly correlated with its endocrine system. Through its release of growth hormones, the bee's endocrine system promotes the growth and development of the organism. Furthermore, the human growth system uses HGH (human growth hormone) to induce growth (5), (18).

3. How does the fact that honey bees are eusocial impact their reproduction and social behavior? - Honey bees are eusocial, meaning that their colonies include non-reproductive members and they have a highly structured society formed around a single female, the queen. Because the queen is the single reproductive female she controls which eggs are fertilized, which in turn determines whether the egg develops into a female (fertilized egg) or male (unfertilized egg). The eusocial nature of the honey bee also influences the social behavior of the colony as the life of the hive revolves around the queen and tending to her and her off spring. The queen centric social model provides the mechanism for the continuation of the hive, as through the swarming process the old queen will fly off with a large number of members of the hive to establish a new hive and make way for the new queen (4). 4. How is the digestive/waste system of the honey bee similar or distinct to humans? -Unlike humans, the honey bee does not separate its waste streams into solid and liquid wastes. Instead, the bee process those wastes together by passing food into its ventriculus (which acts like the human stomach) where the pollen, nectar or honey is digested and passed to the ileum, the bee's small intestine. The bee's malpighian tubules function like a human kidney in a rudimentary way by filtering the bee's waste and recycling the fluid back to the ileum (4), (16), (18).

5. What are some of the unique ways that the honey bee avoids predation? - Honey bees avoid predators by building their hives in protected structures and by living in very large colonies in the hive. In addition, the worker bee has a unique barbed stinger which embeds the stinger in the victim and causes significant pain. The group behavior of the honey bee is another unique adaptation to avoid predation such as the swarming behavior where hundreds of individuals will attack a predator, many of them sacrificing their life in the process (3), (14).

Sources:

( 3) Burchill, Shirley. “The Breathing System of Insects.” The Open Door Web Site : Biology : The Tracheal Breathing System of Insects , [].

<span style="background-color: #f1f4f5; color: #000000; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue',HelveticaNeue,'TeX Gyre Heros',TeXGyreHeros,FreeSans,'Nimbus Sans L','Liberation Sans',Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">( <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">16) Web, Animal Diversity. “Critter Catalog.” BioKIDS - Kids' Inquiry of Diverse Species, Apis Mellifera, Honey Bee: Information, <span style="background-color: #f1f4f5; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">www.biokids.umich.edu/critters/Apis_mellifera/

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;">(14) Nouvian, Morgane; Reihard, Judith and Guirfa, Martin. " The defensive response of the honeybee Apis mellifera." Journal of Experimental Biology (2016) 219, 3505-3517, []

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;">(5) Collison, Clarence. "A Closer Look at Glands and Hormones." Bee Culture, The Magazine of American Bee Keeping (December 21, 2015), http://www.beeculture.com/a-closer-look-endocrine-glands-hormones/

(4) Hammond, George and Blankenship, Madison. "//Apis mellifera// Honey Bee" Animal Diversity Web, http://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Apis_mellifera/

(1)"Featured Creatures" UF/IFAS, University of Florida, http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/MISC/BEES/euro_honey_bee.htm

(8)The Crankshaft Publishing what-when-how.com. "Respiratory System (insects)", http://what-when-how.com/insects/respiratory-system-insects/

(13) The Perfect Bee, Your First Bee and Beyond. "How Do Bees Make Honey?", https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/the-life-of-bees/bees-make-honey/

(15) Kloeppel, James, "Honey bee chemoreceptors found for smell and taste." University of Illinois News Bureau (October 25, 2006), @https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/206824

(2) Wildscreen, Arkive. "Honey Bee, //Apis mellifera//", http://www.arkive.org/honey-bee/apis-mellifera/

(10) Iowa State University "Order Hymenoptera- Ants, Bees, Wasps and Sawflies" Bug Guide, https://bugguide.net/node/view/59

(6) https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/kids/photos/animals/Bugs/H-P/honeybees-map.ngsversion.1472674740256.gif

(7) https://ecologyhelp.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/8/8/11884011/9081361_orig.jpg

(9) http://www.beeculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/1Collison.jpg

(12) http://aprillancebees.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Honey-Bee.jpg

(11) http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&p=&esrc=s...5094317422

(17) Adventuresinbeeland, "Bee and Bee Boles at the Lost Gardens of Heligan" October 8, 2017, https://adventuresinbeeland.com/2017/10/08/bees-and-bee-boles-at-the-lost-gardens-of-heligan/

(18) Ellis, Jamie, "Internal Anatomy of the Honey Bee." American Bee Journal, September 1, 2015, http://americanbeejournal.com/the-internal-anatomy-of-the-honey-bee/

(19) <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;">The Perfect Bee, Your First Bee and Beyond. "The Anatomy of Bees", https://www.perfectbee.com/learn-about-bees/anatomy-of-bees/

(20) Honey Bee Suite, "Physics for Bee Keepers, Temperature in the Hive", https://honeybeesuite.com/physics-for-beekeepers-temperature-in-the-hive/