Useful links:

Do Honeybees hibernate?
Technically they do. The queens can live 4 to 6 years, and, unlike most insects, some workers and the queen can remain active over the winter months, ensuring the maintenance and continuation of the hive in readiness for the next year.

Where do they live?
Honeybees live in hives, either artificially created and maintained for the purposes of either pollination or the production of honey (with populations of between 40,000 and 100,000) or they are naturally occurring in the wild (with population numbers smaller in size ranging between 20,000 to 40,000).

What role do they each perform?
Queens produce three different castes, drones, workers and queens, each of which will go through an egg, larvae and pupa stage before hatching into the hive. This can be very quick, with average times between laying and young adults emerging being between 16 days for the queen, to 24 days for the drones.

There is a single queen, who produces all the bees for the colony. Drones are the males, whose sole job is to mate with the young queens. They don’t contribute to the upkeep of the hive in any other way, so once their job is done, they are redundant, and driven from the hive. Most only live between 21 and 32 days, and they don’t survive the season.

The workers are further subdivided into house and field workers. House bees stay in the hive and tend to the queen, as well as maintaining the hive’s construction, and looking after the young bees. Field bees do the foraging away from the hive, carrying back collected pollen in specially constructed pollen baskets on their legs, and transporting nectar in an extra stomach.

Some of the larvae are fed with a different substance called Royal Jelly, which is especially rich in mandible gland secretions, and these eggs will eventually turn into young queens.

The major thing that honeybees do besides pollination is to produce the honey, and they do this by worker bees building the honeycomb in the hive out of secretions of wax that comes from their underside, and fashioning it into hexagonal shapes which join together to make the classical look that we associate with beehives and honey.

If a honeybee stings you, will it die?

Yes, however it is only the females that have a sting. Because of the barbs on the actual thorax which hold the sting in place once it’s been delivered, when the bee pulls away it leaves that part of its body behind, which proves fatal to it. Honeybees can also swarm if they consider themselves under attack.

What’s the difference between pollen and nectar?
Nectar provides the necessary sugars, sucrose and carbohydrates that bees use to give them energy. Putting a very involved process simply, bees use enzymes to break down and modify the nectar into the substance we know as honey. Pollen is almost the only substance available to the bees that they can obtain their protein from, and it helps with their growth and development, which is why the symbiotic relationship between plants and bees is absolutely essential to both.

What are honeybees role in Pollination?
Similar to the Bumblebee, the honeybee will visit both the male and female parts of the flowers gathering pollen and nectar and transferring it from one to the other, thus fertilizing the plant in the process.

Are honeybees susceptible to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)?
Yes. CCD is a disease that infects the bee, eventually killing it, and infecting the whole hive, proving fatal to the rest of the bees, usually in a very short space of time. It has been a problem in the US for a while, and there are increasing reports of outbreaks in large numbers of hives across Europe.

What is CCD, and what are the causes?
No one is sure, which is part of the whole problem, and why the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has to find the £8m pounds needed to fund research into the possible causes, and offer plausible solutions and remediation. The outcome is pretty clear. Whole colonies of bees are being infected with something that acts very rapidly, killing the hive within a matter of days. There are several theories as to what might cause it:

The Varroa mite is a small pest that attacks the bee by first attaching itself to the body, then working itself under the skin and into the bee, sucking the blood out of it. Once in the hive, it establishes itself by infecting the eggs and establishing itself, usually over two to three years, before suddenly overwhelming the bees inside. When this does happens it can occur in a very short space of time. There are treatments for the mite, but there is some evidence that the mite is becoming resistant to the chemicals used to control the spread.

There is also a possibility that some of these acaricide chemicals may be adding to the problems. The news that organic hives seem to display some resistance to CCD could suggest some weight behind this theory.

A parasitic fungus, Nosema ceranae, causes infected bees to die within eight days. It could be the reason behind CCD, and there is research dedicated to this, but it seems to be dependant on the bee’s immune system to be initially compromised and weakened by insecticides and fungicides.

American foulbrood is a persistent bacteria spore which infects the bee at the larvae stage, killing it. There is no known antidote to the disease, so when this happens, the hive has to be destroyed.

Bees, like other insects, are very sensitive to magnetic fields, and with the rapid increase of small scale radiation from almost every form of human activity, there is a concern that this might be affecting the bees in some way.

Stress. Bees are very social insects, and the way that they are transported over long distances in the agricultural industry, to pollinate crops on an industrial scale could be a contributing factor.

Like Bumbles, there are also pressures upon its natural food supply due to intensive farming methods, which can put additional strain on the hive.

What can we do?
We can sign the petition listed below in the useful links, we can petition direct to DEFRA to find out why the research isn’t being undertaken, and we can keep talking and publicising about a potential world without our bees.

References
Bee, Claire Preston (Reaktion Books Ltd, London - ISBN 1-86189 256 X)

The Biology of the Honey Bee, Mark L. Winston (Harvard University Press, Massachusetts – ISBN 0-674-07409-2)

Useful links
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/BeeResearch
www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/honeyBeeOrganicFarming.php

Further Reading
Bees and Honey, From Flower to Jar, Michael Weiler (Floris Books, Edinburgh - ISBN 0-86315-575-8)

Bee, Claire Preston (Reaktion Books Ltd, London - ISBN 1-86189 256 X)