Breathe In, Breathe out! Bee Respiration

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How does a bee get oxygen? Well, bees use a completely different system. They do not have lungs.

 The blood then brings used oxygen – in the form of Carbon dioxide, back to the lungs where this is released into the air and fresh oxygen.

How We Breathe

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Major segments are further divided into smaller segments – for example, the abdomen has multiple segments.

How Bees Breathe

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Spiracles are connected to pipes that look a bit like vacuum cleaner pipes.

Spiracles 

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trachea eventually branches to the point where they are very small, at which point they are called tracheoles. 

Trachea 

To pump air in and out of her respiratory system, a bee will lengthen and shorten her abdomen.

Air Sacks

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Bees do not have a well-developed circulator system to pump blood around. In fact, they don’t even have hemoglobin.

How Does Bee Respiration Work?

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It just sloshes around inside the bee basically and is moved around by a heart that runs from the tip of the bee’s abdomen to its head.

Hemolymph

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The part of the heart in the thorax is called the dorsal aorta, and the part in the abdomen is called the dorsal heart.

The Bee  Heart

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They do however have an ability to pump air in and out of their bodies using the air sacks we mentioned earlier. 

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