And in your creation and all the creatures He has spread about there are signs for people with certainty. (Surat al-Jathiyya: 4)

Bees constitute a number of families, with some 20,000 species. They possess the most astonishing knowledge of engineering and architecture in the animal kingdom, stand out from many other creatures in terms of their social lives, and amaze scientists who study their means of communication.

The bees dealt with in this book possess rather different properties from other insect species. They live in colonies, building their nests in tree trunks or similar closed areas. A bee colony consists of a queen, a few hundred males, and from 10,000 to 80,000 workers. Of these three very different-looking bees, two-the queen and the workers-are female.

There is one queen to each colony, and she is much larger in size than the other bees. Her main task is to lay eggs. Reproduction can take place only by means of the queen, and no other females are able to mate with the drone males. In addition to laying eggs, the queen also secretes important communicative substances that maintain the unity of the colony and the working of the various systems inside it.

The drones are larger than the female workers, though they lack stings and the necessary organs to collect food for themselves. Their only function is to fertilize the queen. The worker bees perform all such other tasks that you might imagine, including making the waxen combs in the hive, gathering food, producing royal jelly, regulating the temperature in the hive, cleaning it of debris and defending it.

There is order in every phase of the life in the beehive. Every task, from the care of the larvae to meeting the general needs of the nest, is performed to the full. This can be seen more clearly when we detail the care and altruistic behavior that the other bees display to their young.

How Bees Care for their Young

The young of some creatures require greater care than the young of others. In particular, creatures that reach adulthood via various stages, such as the egg, larva and pupa of a moth or butterfly, require a different form of care at each stage.

Bees also go through a number of growth stages. Young bees reach adulthood by completing their larval and pupal stages. Throughout this period, which begins with the queen laying her eggs, bees take great care of their developing young.

All responsibility for caring for the larvae falls to the worker bees in the hive, which prepare incubation cells in a region specially set aside in the combs where the queen can lay her eggs. The queen bee comes here, and after checking the cleanliness and suitability of each cell, she deposits one egg in it and moves on.

Once the conditions essential to the development of the eggs have been met, a great many other factors must be organized, including meeting the food needs of the larvae that will hatch from them, the stabilization of the cell temperature, and special recurring inspections of the cells. The worker bees take great care of the larva, and employ intricate methods to do so.

This article is based on the works of Harunyahya www.harunyahya.com