4.0 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEYBEE
The candidate will be:
4.4 able to give a simple description of wax production and comb building by the honeybee;
NOTES
Worker bees have wax glands on the underside of their abdomen. From these glands they can produce small flakes of translucent wax.
It takes a lot of energy for the bees to produce wax, both in the form of food from honey for the bee to generate the wax and also for its fellow comb builders to be able to generate heat to soften and manipulate the wax.
The worker extrudes a wax scale from its abdomen, passes it to its mouth parts using its legs and moulds it into shape with its mandibles.
Bees that draw comb naturally will start depositing lumps of wax at the top of the hive and increasingly add more, gradually working the comb down vertically using gravity as a guide.
“Chains” of hanging bees can sometimes be seen as comb building progresses. Bees work in clusters of wax builders to generate and conserve heat.
Combs are drawn down and the wax gradually stretched out into cells. Teams of bees work in parallel and this produces the double “bee space” spacing of combs – the width of 2 bees working back to back.
The cells are also a function of the size of the bee as it produces a cylinder shape around its body. Bees work a body width apart and as the cylinder meets with the neighbours it becomes moulded into the familiar hexagonal form as a result of the close packing.