Information for Seniors

Honey Bee

• Honey bees have been kept in NZ for more than 150 years.
• Beekeeping started in the home but has become a major industry
• NZ is now recognised as one of the world’s most advanced beekeeping countries and is a leader in several important fields
• While NZ already had native species of bees, they were not suitable for producing honey, their role was as pollinators
• More bee species were brought to NZ in 1843
• In 1848, William Cotton wrote a manual for NZ beekeepers, describing the basics of bee husbandry and production of honey
• The NZ bush proved a hospitable place for bees, and the number of wild colonies, through swarming, multiplied rapidly, especially in the Bay of Islands
• Isaac Hopkins was regarded as the father of beekeeping
• Honey was sold by Māori by the turn of the century– making them the country’s first commercial beekeepers
• The commercial production of honey in NZ began during the late 1870s, following the introduction of the Langstroth hive, the boxed-framed beehive model still used today

Life Cycle

• A colony generally contains one queen bee
• Thousands of drone bees, or males
• Tens of thousands of female worker bees
• Eggs are laid singly in a cell in a wax honeycomb, produced and shaped by the worker bees
• Using her spermatheca, the queen can choose to fertilize the egg she is laying
• Larvae are initially fed with royal jelly produced by worker bees, later switching to honey and pollen
• The larva undergoes several moultings before spinning a cocoon within the cell, and pupating
• Young worker bees, sometimes called “nurse bees”, clean the hive and feed the larvae
• When their royal jelly-producing glands begin to atrophy, they begin building comb cells
• They progress to other within-colony tasks as they become older, such as receiving nectar and pollen from foragers, and guarding the hive
• Later still, a worker takes her first orientation flights and finally leaves the hive and typically spends the remainder of her life as a forager
• Worker bees cooperate to find food and use a pattern of “dancing” (known as the bee dance or waggle dance) to communicate Honey bees also perform tremble dances, which recruit receiver bees to collect nectar from returning foragers
• Colonies are established not by solitary queens, as in most bees, but by groups known as “swarms“, which consist of a mated queen and a large contingent of worker bees
• This group moves en masse to a nest site which was scouted by worker bees beforehand and whose location is communicated with a special type of dance
• Once the swarm arrives, they immediately construct a new wax comb and begin to raise new worker brood