Blog Post from Cailan

What Are Bee Hives For?

Bees make their hives to store food and shelter the bees. Bees make their

hives to protect them. The bees store anything from eggs, to pollen, to honey.

When the bee hive is getting built by the bees, the bees produce beeswax

to create a strong and hard interior of the beehive. They use the beeswax

to make these perfect little hexagon shapes in the hive. They store the food

and eggs in them. These are called honeycombs.

Jobs Inside The Hive

The three main types of bees are the worker bee, drone bee and the queen bee. When the queen lays an egg she can either lay a fertilized egg or an unfertilized egg. A fertilized egg hatches into a worker bee or queen bee, while an unfertilized egg will hatch into a drone bee. A worker bee is only female and they have all the jobs to do from collecting nectar, producing honey, keeping the hive clean, guarding the hive and making wax. For every 100 worker bees there are, there is a drone bee. Unlike the female worker bees, drones do not have stingers and gather neither nectar nor pollen. The drone bees primary job is to mate with a queen bee. After mating season the drone bee gets kicked out of the hive. The drone either dies of starvation or freezes. The queen bee is the most important bee of them all and only has one job, she produces new bees. Without the queen bee or a drone the whole hive would die out.