Know the animal
you keep.

A honey bee is three boxes and a set of tools. The head carries the senses and the mouthparts, the thorax is almost entirely engine, and the abdomen holds the crop, the wax glands and the sting. Nothing on her is general purpose. The notch on her foreleg exists to clean an antenna, the hollow on her hind leg exists to carry pollen, and the hooks on her hind wing exist so that two wings behave as one.

Touch a label to read what the part does.

The three castes are the same animal built to three specifications. A queen is longer and has no pollen basket because she will never forage. A drone is mostly eye and flight muscle, because his entire job is to find a queen in open air. A worker carries the full toolkit.

A bee works from a set of channels that overlap almost nowhere with ours. She sees ultraviolet and is blind to red. She reads the polarisation pattern of the sky, which to us is a blank blue. She detects the electric field a flower carries, feels the 265 Hz pulse of a dance through the comb in total darkness, and keeps a clock accurate enough to learn that a particular flower gives nectar at ten in the morning.

Colour is the clearest case. Her three photoreceptors peak near 344, 436 and 544 nanometres, which shifts her whole window down the spectrum. She gains an ultraviolet channel and loses red. Many flowers exploit this with an ultraviolet absorbing centre against a reflecting rim, a landing target we cannot see at all.

A returning forager walks a figure of eight on vertical comb in the dark. The straight run through the middle is the message. Its angle away from straight up is the angle away from the sun that a bee should fly, and how long she waggles for is how far. Gravity stands in for the sun, because there is no sun inside a hive.

Karl von Frisch worked this out in the 1940s and took a Nobel Prize for it in 1973. It was seriously disputed for decades, and was settled by gluing radar transponders to recruits: bees carried away from the hive and released flew the vector they had been given, correct in direction and length, over ground that held no flowers and no scent.

Move the sliders. The bee outside and the dance inside stay locked together.

The claim that aerodynamics proves a bee cannot fly comes from Antoine Magnan in 1934, who applied fixed wing aircraft theory to a flapping wing and said in the same book that the failure must be in the theory. It was. Lift comes from leading edge vortices, from rotational lift as the wing flips at the end of each stroke, and from the wing recapturing energy in its own wake.

Range is the number that matters to a keeper. A colony makes its living inside a kilometre or two and will go much further when it has to, which is why what grows near your stand matters more than what grows on the property line.

The queen gives no orders. She lays, and she releases a pheromone that tells the colony she is present and laying. Everything else is decided from the bottom: which flowers get worked, when to build comb, when to raise a new queen, and where a swarm will live. A swarm choosing a cavity sends out scouts, argues by dancing, and reaches a quorum. It usually picks the best site available.

Caste is not genetic. A fertilised egg becomes a queen or a worker depending entirely on how it is fed in the first days of larval life. The same egg, fed differently, becomes a different animal with a different body and a lifespan fifty times longer.

Honey is nectar that has been chemically altered and then dried. Invertase from the bee splits sucrose into glucose and fructose. Glucose oxidase produces gluconic acid, which takes the pH down near 3.9, and hydrogen peroxide, which keeps being produced whenever honey is diluted. Then the water goes, from somewhere near three quarters down to under a fifth, at which point nothing microbial can grow in it.

The distance behind a jar is the fact everyone repeats and almost everyone gets wrong. The commonly quoted figure is more than fifty thousand miles per pound, which is about 80,467 kilometres, or roughly 88,700 kilometres for a 500 g jar. Working it up from the other end, from crop capacity and round trip distance, gives a considerably larger number. The two do not agree, and we have left the disagreement visible rather than quietly picking one.

Two obligations catch keepers out. American foulbrood is a notifiable disease, so a suspected case is reported to the national agriculture department rather than managed quietly, and confirmation is dealt with by destruction rather than treatment, because the spores outlast anything you can do to them. Annual registration with the department is compulsory, along with marking your hives and keeping records.

The second is the demarcation line between Apis mellifera capensis in the winter rainfall Cape and Apis mellifera scutellata across the rest of the country. Bees may not be transported across it in either direction. A Cape worker can lay diploid female eggs without mating and can parasitise a scutellata colony from the inside, and moving colonies north in 1992 cost an estimated fifty thousand colonies.

The notice number, its date and the parent Act are set out in the full reference, together with a note that we could reach the industry summaries of the gazette but not the gazette itself. Confirm your own obligations with the department rather than with a website.