Die Honigbiene

Die Honigbiene (Apis mellifera, syn. Apis mellifica) ist weltweit verbreitet und gehört innerhalb der Familie der Bienen (Apidae, Stechimme) zur Insektenordung der Hautflügler, von denen 12.000 Arten bekannt sind. Eng verwandt ist sie mit den Solitärbienen, den Sandbienen und den Hummeln.

In Europa arbeiten die meisten Imker, je nach ihrer geografischen Lage, vor allem mit den Honigbienenrassen Apis mellifera carnica, Apis mellifera ligustica, Apis mellifera caucasia und die aus älteren europäischen Rassen gezüchtete Apis mellifera buckfast. Vereinzelt wird auch noch die Deutsche, Dunkle oder Nordische Biene, d. h. die Apis mellifera mellifera angetroffen, die urspünglich den ganzen mitteleuropäischen Raum bis weit nach Russland hinein heimisch war.

Honey (English pronunciation: /ˈhʌni/) is a sweet food made by certain insects using nectar from flowers. The variety produced by honey bees (the genus Apis) is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepers and consumed by humans. Honey produced by other bees and insects has distinctly different properties.

Honey bees form nectar into honey by a process of regurgitation and store it as a food source in wax honeycombs inside the beehive. Beekeeping practices encourage overproduction of honey so that the excess can be taken without endangering the bee colony.

Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and glucose and has approximately the same relative sweetness as that of granulated sugar (74% of the sweetness of sucrose, a disaccharide). It has attractive chemical properties for baking, and a distinctive flavor which leads some people to prefer it over sugar and other sweeteners. Most micro-organisms do not grow in honey because of its low water activity of 0.6.However, honey sometimes contains dormant endospores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which can be dangerous to infants as the endospores can transform into toxin-producing bacteria in the infant's immature intestinal tract, leading to illness and even death (see Potential health hazards below).

Honey has a long history as a comestible and is used in various foods and beverages as a sweetener and flavoring. It also has a role in religion and symbolism. Flavors of honey vary based on the nectar source, and various types and grades of honey are available. It is also used in various medicinal traditions to treat ailments. The study of pollens and spores in raw honey (melissopalynology) can determine floral sources of honey. Because bees carry an electrostatic charge, and can attract other particles, the same techniques of melissopalynology can be used in area environmental studies of radioactive particles, dust, or particulate pollution.

Auf den Bienen leben weder Bakterien noch Viren oder Pilze. Diese Abwehrfähigkeit ist für die Bienen äußert wichtig. Bei einer engen Lebensgemeinschaft von bis zu 80.000 Bienen pro Volk wären die Auswirkungen einer Seuche verheerend. Mit Propolis stärken die Bienen ihr Immunsystem. In ihrer heutigen Erscheinung gibt es Bienen seit 50 Millionen Jahren (Jungtertiär); sie haben sich in dieser Zeit genetisch kaum verändert. Propolis schützt die Bienen seit jeher vor Krankheiten.

Die Bezeichnung Propolis stammt aus dem Griechischen und heißt: " für die Stadt". Die Bienen sammeln die Rohstoffe an Pflanzen, vor allem an Knospen, deren Auszüge sie mit eigenen Sekreten versetzen.

The term queen bee is typically used to refer to an adult, mated female that lives in a honey bee colony or hive; she is usually the mother of all the bees in the hive.The queens are developed from larvae selected by worker bees and specially fed in order to become sexually mature. There is normally only one adult, mated queen in a hive.

The term "queen bee" can be more generally applied to any dominant reproductive female in a colony of a eusocial bee species other than honey bees.

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share with their hive mates information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new housing locations.Thus the waggle dance is a mechanism whereby successful foragers can recruit other bees in their colony to good locations for collecting various resources. It was once thought that bees had two distinct recruitment dances — round dances and waggle dances — the former for indicating nearby targets and the latter for indicating distant targets, but it is now known that a round dance is simply a waggle dance with a very short waggle run (see below). Austrian ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.

Der Pollen oder Blütenstaub ist die meist mehlartige Masse, die in den Antheren der Samenpflanzen gebildet wird. Er besteht aus den Pollenkörnern, den Mikrosporen. Sprachlich ist Pollen ein Sammelname; eine einzelne Mikrospore ist nicht ein Pollen, sondern ein Pollenkorn. Das Pollenkorn ist das Ergebnis einer Reduktionsteilung (Meiose) und besitzt somit nur einen einfachen