I provide my customers with brand solutions and experiences that put them in a better position to move forward. Equally as important to me is a commitment to leaving this earth in better shape than it is today. I encourage my customers to consider ways in which their activities can contribute to positive changes in their communities and in our world — with an added focus on sustainability. It’s exactly why no less than ten percent of my profits go directly towards establishing and growing my honey bee apiary.

Bees and other beneficial insects face a great number of challenges that they never encountered until recent years, but they are a crucial part of our natural world (and the world of industrial agriculture). By partnering with Mellifera, you’re contributing to the health and vitality of local honey bees—which will pollinate local flowers and crops in the Holland area.

Learn more about these unique creatures below, and consider ways in which you can bring about positive change to your area.

It takes 21 days for a worker bee to develop from a fertilized egg to a larva before finally emerging from her cell as an adult. As many as 80,000 worker bees may live in a single hive during the peak of summer. All worker bees are female, and they play many roles throughout their short lives. As soon as an adult worker bee emerges, she is put to work. Her first role will be to clean out her cell, which will be repurposed for another egg.

Some worker bees will take on the role of mortuary bees — removing dead bees from the hive to prevent disease. Others will be responsible for feeding newly hatched male bees (or drones) until they can feed themselves. Some will be selected to become queen attendants, feeding and grooming the queen, while signaling to others in the hive the condition of the queen. Still others will act as water collectors, temperature regulators, guards at hive entrances, honey comb builders, pollen packers, or honey sealers.

Toward the end of her life cycle, the worker bee will graduate to forager status — leaving the hive and traveling within a 3 to 5 mile radius to collect nectar and pollen from plants and flowers. In the summer months, forager bees will be worked to death, carrying out their duties until the ripe old age of just 6 weeks.

Drones are male bees. They are larger in size than the worker bee, with large eyes and thick abdomens that make them easily distinguishable from their sisters. Drones live in the hive amongst the other bees, but regularly leave in search of Drone Congregation Areas, where they hope to find an unmated queen from another hive. Around 10 to 20 drones will mate with a single queen during her mating flight, and each will die immediately after completing the task, as their reproductive organs are ripped out of their bodies during the event.

Though it may be easy to see drones as being less useful than other bees in the hive, they are essential in one element that ensures life in the hive: genetic diversity. More drones mating with a queen means a greater rate of genetic diversity in the hive’s gene pool, which in turn means greater resiliency amongst the colony.

While the drone is essential to the health of the hive, his use decreases in the winter months, when he becomes just another mouth to feed. During this time, the worker bees decrease the population of male drones from a couple of thousand to just a few hundred. They will starve the drones to weaken them, before throwing them out of the hive to die — in some cases, even tearing at their wings to prevent them from returning to the hive. When spring arrives, the number of drones will be allowed to return to higher levels.

The queen is the largest bee in the entire colony and is distinguished by her lengthy abdomen. Despite her name, the queen is really more like a slave than a ruling figure. Although her pheromones can be used to direct other bees in the hive, the queen’s primary purpose is to lay eggs and maintain the balance of life in the colony, and she will be tended to day in and day out to ensure she does so.

A queen is made from an egg like most others in the hive — but an egg selected to become a queen is nurtured differently, and the queen larva will be fed a concoction of what is called “royal jelly” for an extended period of time. This will enable the queen to develop functioning ovaries and become an egg-laying machine, laying around 2,000 eggs per day.

If the queen dies or the other bees sense her egg-laying productivity has decreased, they may need to requeen, selecting new eggs to replace the existing queen. If the queen senses this has happened, she may seek out other queen cells in the hive, chewing them open and stinging the developing larvae to death in order to maintain her place on the throne. If another queen hatches while the current queen is in place, the two will fight to the death to secure their status.