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UNDER CONSTRUCTION

A Bee Hive

This is how bees are normally kept.  This particular hive consists of 3 boxes, called supers, on top of each other.  Each super contains 10 frames which the bees fill with honey, pollen and brood.  A normal colony consists of roughly 20,000 bees.

Observation Hive

This is one of the methods used to observe bees inside the hive.  It is basically a small hive with glass wallls.  The bees can go outside to forage through the tube that leads to the window.

Queen Bee

In the middle of this photo is a queen bee.  You can distinguish her from the other bees due to her long abdomen.  The queen's main function in the hive is to lay eggs.  Despite her name, she does not dictate the colony's actions

Tagged Bee

In the middle of this photo is a bee with a yellow plastic tag on her thorax.  In order to identify individual bees we often glue these colored and numbered tags to them.  In this photo and the one below you can also see bees that have dabs of different paint colors on their bodies.  This is another method used to distinguish bees from each other.  The white things in the background of this photo are larvae.

Painted Bees

This is the photo from which the close-up above was taken.

Bees on an Artificial Feeder

For many experiments bees are trained to an artificial feeder like the one pictured above.  The solution in the container is sugar water that the bees suck up using their long tongues (proboscis).

Bees on Honey Comb

This is a picture of some bees on a comb of honey that has been capped over.  Bees store honey in wax cells.  When a cell is full of honey they put a wax cap on it.  That is the yellow that you see in the background of this picture.  This picture also shows the nice hexagonal shape that wax cells typically have.

Backlit Bees

Bumblebee Flight Cage

This is a bumblebee colony with an atached flight cage.  The box with a yellow cap on it is the colony's hive.  The wooden structure covered with green mesh is a flight cage that the bees were allowed to fly around in.  Above the flight cage are lights.

Bumblebee Colony

This is a picture of inside the bumblebee hive.  You can see fairly clearly the honey and pollen storage pots.  They aren't neatly hexagonal like the cells of a honeybee colony.

Bumblebee Colony Close-up

Here is a better picture of the bumblebee storage pots with a ruler for reference.

Comparisons of a Honeybee and a Bumblebee

Bottoms up

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Bee Related Sites
Honeybee Biology
Honeybee Australis
Honeybee Course Home Page
The Internet Apiculture and Beekeeping Archive
Bee Improvement and Bee Breeder's Association - BIBBA
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The Bumblebee Pages
CyberBeeNet (Biology, Research, Beekeeping)
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