Without honeycombs, a bee family cannot exist. In them, she adds honey, pollen, and in them she grows brood (this is the future generation of young bees).
There are 3 types of honeycombs: with bee cells, drone cells and transitional ones.
The first two types of cells must be strictly sized, both in depth and in width. As for the transitional ones, they can be of various shapes, moreover, they are not always hexagonal.
Honey bees can be stored in all three types of cells.
As a rule, construction starts from top to bottom. Sometimes they build at the same time from different sides and meet in the center. Then I recalled the case when two brigades of workers built a bridge across the river. The construction took place simultaneously from both banks and according to plan, it was supposed to end in the center of the river. When both sides of the bridge began to approach each other, it turned out that the divergence from the straight line was more than 3 meters. Of course, the human factor and someone’s miscalculation were to blame. So in cases with bees, this is simply impossible.
In order for you to imagine how amazing this is, I remind you that the bees do not have a brain and they cannot communicate.
In the construction of honeycombs, not the whole family takes part, but only those bees that produce wax mirrors. During an already short life (35-40 days in the summer), a bee produces wax for only a few days (4-6). And this means that the bee can begin its construction work, but do not have time to finish. And then another bee will continue it.
Almost any girl, because wax is, in fact, bee fat, from which she gets rid with incredible ease. And for this, she does not need to do any physical exercises, keep diets, but on the contrary, she needs more honey or nectar. The more the bee eats, the more it produces wax.
I mentioned above that bees produce wax for only a few days of their life, but this is not entirely true. This happens only in a full-fledged family, where there are bees of all ages: cleaners, builders, nurses, guards, uterine retinues, as well as receivers and pickers.
Each bee, throughout its short life, performs all of these functions.
But imagine that we selected a certain group of flying bees, and such a bee becomes in the last days of its life, and planted them in another hive.
The wax glands of this bee have not been working for a long time and, in theory, it should no longer build honeycombs. But this is only true for people: a person of retirement age is no longer able to do the physical work that he easily did in his youth. Things are different with bees.
A flying bee, falling into such conditions, is able to re-activate the functions of its body, begin to produce royal jelly, to feed the brood and uterus, to produce wax for the construction of honeycombs.
A bee, driven into harsh conditions, can literally rejuvenate for a while.
A bee is in full control of its life span. She can extend it when circumstances require it (experiments have shown that a bee is able to live throughout the whole year). Also, she is able to shorten it with exhausting work for the benefit of the family.
A bee accurate to the minute, knows when it will die.
