The bee community When dealing with a social insect it is necessary not only to look at the individual life and behaviour of members of the colony but also to look at the society as a whole and its behaviour as a unit. This is the way in which the beekeeper looks at his bees | The bee community When dealing with a social insect it is necessary not only to look at the individual life and behaviour of members of the colony but also to look at the society as a whole and its behaviour as a unit. This is the way in which the beekeeper looks at his bees in terms of colonies and colony behaviour rather than as collections of individuals and individual behaviour. The two do overlap and it is necessary to be aware of both. In dealing briefly with development of individuals we have already dealt with several facets of colony behaviour such as defence and foraging. Now I would like to expand what has been written in the two previous chapters in the light of colony organization. The honeybee is thought to have originated in tropical areas and to have spread to other parts of the world by adaptation. The seasonal cycle varies in different parts of the world from the almost continuous round of flora in sub-tropical areas through two periods of fluctuation from dearth to plenty in the tropics to a definite annual peak and decline in the temperate zones. In northern temperate lands there are little or no flowers producing forage for the honeybee from October to March and it has to survive a six months dearth period using stores it has packed away in the previous period of plenty. Unfortunately the periods of plenty are often very short in countries like Britain and the whole crop is brought in by the bees in a short three-week period. The bee has adapted to this type of environment by a big cyclic variation in the size of population of the colony synchronized with the availability of forage. This annual cycle is illustrated by the annual population graph shown in fig. 9. This mean or average graph is much smoother than would be the case with an actual colony which would show many short-term fluctuations in egg laying rate especially in the early part of the season. I have shown the queen starting to lay in early January and from then gradually .
