The Honey Bee - Foraging and Communication
Foraging. Worker bees visit flowers and collect nectar. The bees mouthparts form a type of tube which can probe into flowers to reach the nectaries. The nectar Frog Toad Supplies sucked up, stored temporarily in the gut, taken back to the hive and passed to the house bees. These bees process the nectar to form honey. They do this by repeatedly swallowing it, mixing it with enzymes and regurgitating it. Eventually it is stored in the Tortoise Supplies of the honeycomb.
The workers also collect pollen from the flowers. Their bodies E2macpets dusted with pollen from ripe stamens when they visit the flower. The bee uses its legs to brush the pollen from its body, and Ball Python Supplies it into a pollen sac on each hind leg. On returning to the hive the pollen sacs are E2macpets and stored in the cells. The honey supplies the carbohydrate and the pollen provides the protein in the bees diet. The larvae are fed on a mixture of honey and pollen.
Communication. When a worker who has found a good source of nectar returns to the hive, she executes a dance on the vertical surface of the comb. The dance takes the form of a flattened figure 8. The angle between the vertical and the flattened, central part of the figure 8 represents the angle between the hive, the sun and the nectar source. If the dancing bee waggles her abdomen during this section of the dance it indicates that the nectar source is some distance away. In the darkness of the hive, the workers follow the dancing bee round and learn the direction and distance of the food source. The dancing bee also regurgitates some of the nectar to offer the followers who, therefore, learn the taste of it. The scent from the flower might also help identify its source.
D G Mackean is the author of GCSE Biology, IGCSE Biology, and many other Biology text books. He has a site of Biology Teaching Resources at http://www.biology-resources.com which Pet Reptile Supplies a bank of experiments for teachers, sample PowerPoint presentations, and many biological drawings
