Feral bees

After a knock-back at the Belair Park's gate #6, and apparent adversity today, we stumbled onto a small but extremely active feral bee hive in a hollow tree. It was just off the main path and it was fascinating, watching the pollen laden bees coming in, others departing empty, with the drone bees hanging around supervising.

We have never found a feral bee hive in the wild, and never seen let alone photographed drone bees before. You can pick the drones as they are larger than the worker bees and have very large eyes that touch together.

The Railways Department had chained up our favourite entrance gate to the park that leads to the best birding area. Instead we took a different path and that is how we found the bees. We were able to stand quite close to the nest, just over 2 metres away and did not get stung, thanks in part to using the zoom lens to get close enough. The shaded entrance to the nest was rather dark, and as I had no fill flash with me, the good old ISO had to do the rest of the work.

There are 3 types of bees associated with the hive:
• The queen honeybee is the product of a fertilized egg, as are all females in the hive, however, the queen receives a special diet throughout larval life. That diet consists of royal jelly for the first 3 days and a modified jelly thereafter. The queen bee is the biggest bee in the hive, and our chances of ever seeing one are almost zero.

She mates with a variety of drones during her maiden flights. Normally there is one queen in a hive but there can be exceptions and a queen may live 2 or more years.

Worker bees (imperfect females)
• Worker bees are all females. They spend most of their lives foraging for food.

Drones
• Drones are the male bees and they have no father (being the product of an unfertilised egg). They are very specialized in that they are defenceless (no stinger), do not forage (early in life are fed by workers), come equipped with very large eyes and antennae with specialized receptors enabling them to locate a queen on her maiden flight.

Their sole purpose is to impregnate a maiden queen and if successful their reward is death (upon uncoupling they leave behind part of their anatomy which causes their demise).
The drone is the only male bee in the colony. They make up a relatively small percentage of the hive’s total population.

Bigger eyes on the drone.

See Paladian's wonderful blip of the grass head, found very near to the bee's nest.