Beekeeping Trivia

A healthy hive runs like a tiny, ruthless economy — one queen, thousands of workers, and a handful of drones who exist for a single purpose.

Life Inside the Hive

Every hive centers on a single queen, whose sole job is laying eggs, sometimes over a thousand a day. All the workers who do the actual labor of the colony — foraging, building comb, guarding the entrance — are female, while drones exist for one purpose: mating with a queen. Which caste a larva becomes often comes down to diet — larvae destined to be queens are fed royal jelly exclusively.

Talking Without Words

Bees communicate through a "waggle dance," decoded by scientist Karl von Frisch, that tells hive mates the direction and distance of a good food source. Beekeepers exploit bee biology too: smoke calms a colony by masking the alarm pheromones bees release when threatened.

Handle With Care

• A honeybee's barbed stinger gets lodged in mammal skin, so it dies after stinging once.
• Bees cluster and fan their wings to hold the hive at a stable, warm temperature.
• The movable-frame hive most backyard beekeepers use today was patented by Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth in 1852.