Glossary

When bees complete leave the hive. Can occur for a variety of reasons, one being if they are checked/disturbed too frequently when first established in the new hive.

An acute allergic reaction to an antigen (released by body when encountering bee venom) to which the body has become hypersensitive.

A toxin or other foreign substance that induces an immune response in the body, especially the production of antibodies.

A place where bees are kept; collection of beehives.

The use of products derived from bees as medicine, including venom, honey, pollen, and royal jelly.

A mixture of 25% honey or nectar, 70% pollen, and natural probiotics from the bee saliva.

A sticky yellowish moldable substance secreted by honey bees as the material of honeycomb.

Young larva of bees, if they are capped brood then they have entered the pupal stage.

A thin layer of wax used to cover the full cells of honey.

The phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees and the queen.

The beeswax structure of cells where the queen bee lays eggs.

Convey the location of resources. 1) The Round dance is performed when the resource is located within 10 meters of the hive. She will enter the hive and dance several circles often reversing her direction and pausing to share a taste of the resource she retried. This dance indicates that bees can easily locate the resources by flying in a circle around the hive while searching for the floral odor present on the dancer. 2) The Sickle dance is performed when the resource is located between 10 to 100 meters. The bee dances similar to the round dance except with several crescent shaped formations on the comb. 3) The Waggle dance is performed when the resources is more than 100 meters away and is different from the other two dances because it communicates distance and direction. The bee begins vibrating (or waggling) as she walks in a precise direction, performing figure eights. The time duration of the vibrating segment of the waggle dance is directly proportional to the distance the resource is located from the hive. The direction of the vibrating segment is in relation to the position of the sun in the sky used to determine the location of the nectar source in relation to the hive.

Where the bees live and raise young, as well as store reserves to survive the winter.

Fully formed wax cells that can be filled with honey, pollen, brood, or bee bread.

When bees congregate in the hive on a corner of the apiary because they cannot find their original hive.

A wooden dowel that makes the main entrance of the hive small enough that a new colony can thermoregulate and defend their stores until the population increases.

A mechanical device used in the extraction of honey from honeycombs. A honey extractor extracts the honey from the honeycomb without destroying the comb by using centrifugal force.

A plant material (in this case nectar and pollen) eaten by an animal.

The base layer (either plastic or wax) that is straight and allows bees to build the remaining comb.

Wood or plastic removable hive piece that contains the comb.

A sweet, sticky, yellowish-brown fluid made by bees and other insects from nectar collected from flowers.

A part of a commercial or other managed (such as by a hobbyist) beehive that is used to collect honey.

A heritable trait of individual workers that confers colony-level resistance against various brood diseases. Hygienic workers detect and remove dead or diseased brood from sealed cells.

A sugary fluid secreted by plants, especially within flowers to encourage pollination by insects and other animals. Collected by foragers.

Produces a pheromone used in recruitment in worker honey bees.

(pronounced ‘nuke’) Is a nuclear hive. The term refers both to the smaller size box (half the size of a deep) and the colony of honey bees within it. The name is derived from the fact that a nuc hive is centered on a queen, the nucleus of the honey bee colony.

A screened cage the size of a shoebox with usually 3 pounds of bees, a can of sugar syrup and a queen in a box; used to ship your new colony of bees.

A fine powdery substance, typically yellow, consisting of microscopic grains discharged from the male part of a flower. Collected by foragers.

Foraging behavior that is done by younger bees due to a major loss of regular aged foragers. Ex foragers continually dying, eventually nurse bees will be foraging, they also die (they are not as good at foraging) and the entire social structure of the hive collapses.

A red or brown resinous substance collected by honey bees from tree buds, used by them to fill crevices and to seal and varnish honeycombs in an antibacterial coating.

A sheet of evenly spaced metal bars that separates the super from the deep. The bars are spaced so that a worker can squeeze through and fill the super with honey but the queen cannot get into the super to lay eggs.

A substance secreted by honey bee workers and fed by them to larvae that are being raised as potential queen bees.

Box always above the deep separated by the queen excluder. The “pantry” of the bees, should contain only nectar and honey; placed on the hive during the main nectar flow.

The replacement of an old or inferior queen bee by a young or superior. The supercedure cells looks like a peanut on the upper half of the frame.

The process by which a new honey bee colony is formed when the queen bee leaves the colony with a large group of worker bees.

Exhibiting the exchange of regurgitated food that occurs between adults and larvae in colonies of social insects. Pest species can mimic this behavior (i.e. small hive beetle) with their antennae in order to induce regurgitation of honey from nurse bees.