TEFL Academy Level 5 - Assignment A (Text 3 – Upper intermediate)

TEFL Academy Level 5 - Assignment A (Text 3 – Upper intermediate) Queen Larvae which are fed only royal jelly become potential queen bees. Queens are the reproductive caste. There is usually only one queen in a colony. The queen is the only female bee in a hive that is able to reproduce. She lays around 2,000 eggs a day, each in an individual honeycomb cell. Queens normally live for three to five years. However, not all queens survive, as newly emerged queens often kill each other in the nest. Queens only leave the nest in order to mate or establish a new colony. When one leaves, she takes a large group of workers with her. © 2021 The TEFL Academy. All rights Reserved. (March 1st, 2021) 2 Worker Worker bees develop from larvae that are fed royal jelly only for the first few days. They are then given nectar and pollen. Worker bees are female bees, but they do not mate and do not generally lay eggs. Workers perform all the other duties needed to keep their colony functioning. This includes a bee’s best known behaviour; collecting nectar from flowers to turn into honey. Honey is the food that the bees live on in the winter. When they are collecting nectar, bees pollinate the plants they visit. Worker bees can have other roles, such as making honeycomb. Young ‘nurse bees’ feed the larvae and keep the nest clean. Worker bees live for between 6 weeks and five months. Drone Drones are male bees. Male bees are produced from unfertilised 2 eggs and, as larvae, receive the same diet as workers. Drones' only function is to mate with the queen, after which they die. A typical honey bee colony will usually contain between 20,000-50,000 bees. Only about 15% of these are drones. Come winter, remaining drones are thrown out of the colony in order to save resources. Otherwise, the only reason drones leave the colony is to mate with a new queen. In recent years there has been a worrying decrease in the populations of many bee species. Honeybees are suffering from colony collapse, where large numbers of workers leave the nest and do not return. Major causes of this decline are the use of pesticides 3 , climate change, loss of habitat and loss of plant biodiversity 4 . 100 crops produce up to 90% of our human diets. 70 of those crops rely on bees for pollination. This means that a disaster for bees is a disaster for humans too. Many of the plants that animals rely on are also pollinated by bees. Plants not only provide food, but they also perform many other essential functions, including producing the oxygen we breathe. The death of bee populations could lead to widespread ecological collapse. 1 larva (noun – singular) /ˈlɑrvə/, larvae (noun - plural) /ˈlɑrvi/ = an insect at the stage when it has just come out of an egg and looks like a short fat worm - Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary