In the wild, worker bees will build the hives in rock crevices or hollow trees.  Once a worker is about 10 days old, her wax producing gland is mature.  This gland, which is located in the abdomen, is essential to the building process.  First, the forage workers go out to collect the nectar from flowers, carrying it in their pollen pouch where it combines with a specialized enzyme.  They return to the hive and transfer the nectar to the honey worker, who evaporates the nectar to form honey.  Our hive building worker then converts the sugars from the honey into a waxy substance that is pushed out of the bee’s pores forming white flakes.  The flakes are peeled off the abdomen and chewed up until they are soft and pliable.  The wax is now able to be used for construction of the cells in the honeycomb which provides housing for the larvae and storage for food, nectar, and pollen.

The western honey bee has spread to every continent except for Antarctica.  Thought to be native to Africa or Asia, the bee has been introduced everywhere else by humans, who have become bee farmers of a sort.  

Honey bees eat pollen and nectar from flowers.  In the winter, they will eat the honey that they have made and stored in the hive.

When the virgin queen is ready to mate she flies to a congregation of drones, also called an assembly area.  The queen will be mounted mid-flight with as many as 24 different drones.  The drone bee inserts his endophallus into the queen and ejaculates, however his endophallus remains inside the queen, essentially tearing out his abdomen and leaving him to die.  She will mate until herspermetheca (sperm reservoir) is full, holding more than 5 million spermatozoa.  These will be all the sperm that she will have access to in her lifetime.  It may take her multiple mating flights for this to happen.  After returning to the hive, she will begin laying eggs in about 3 days and will not leave the hive again.

The honey bee’s egg is smaller than a grain of rice at about 1 mm long.  A young queen will lay her eggs in an organized pattern after examining each cell.  She can lay up to 2,000 eggs each day.  As the queen becomes older, she will lay fewer eggs and loose the organizational pattern.  The nurse worker bees will follow the queen and place honey, royal jelly and other foods for larvae on the outer edges of each cell. The development of each egg differs depending on their job: drones take 24 days to mature, workers take 21 days, and queens take 16 days.

Bees are preyed upon by insects, spiders, toads, frogs, lizards, birds, bears, opossums, racoons, skunks, and honey badgers.