Honeybee

Honeybees have a intense color pattern to caution potential predators (or honey thieves!) that they have a weapon to protect themselves. Their weapon is a customized ovipositor (egg-laying tube). This is mutual with a venom gland to make a stinger (formally known as an aculeus) situated at the end of the abdomen. Because the stinger is adapted from a structure found only in females, male bees cannot sting. When the hive is endangered, honeybees will group out and assault with their stingers to drive the enemy away.

Three classes of honeybees

* Workers: immature females with stings, seen only in early summer.
* Queens: superior in size than workers.
* Drones or males: larger than the workers but with no sting.

Worker bees do all the dissimilar tasks wanted to maintain and operate the hive. They make up the huge majority of the hive's occupants and they are all sterile females. When young, they are called house bees and work in the hive doing comb construction, brood rearing, treatment the queen and drones, cleaning, temperature regulation and defensive the hive.

There is only one queen in a hive and her major purpose in life is to create more bees. She can lay over 1,500 eggs for each day and will live two to eight years. She is larger (up to 20mm) and has a longer abdomen than the workers or drones. She has chewing mouthparts. Her stinger is bent with no barbs on it and she can use it lots of times.

Drones, as they are males, contain no stinger. They live concerning eight weeks. Only a few hundred - at most - are ever there in the hive. Their sole function is to buddy with a new queen, if one is produced in a given year. A drone's eyes are obviously bigger than those of the additional castes.