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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60133 Medium Honeybees: life in the colony and the threats they face

Read the following passage.

A. Honeybees are social insects, and a single bee cannot survive for long without its colony. Inside the colony, work is divided among the members, and each bee labours for the good of the group rather than for itself. Even stinging serves the colony, since a bee that stings usually dies. People keep honeybees for honey and beeswax, and many beekeepers also earn money by placing colonies near crops that need pollinating. In 2025, Canada had a record 854,653 honeybee colonies, and about 63 per cent of them were kept in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

B. A colony holds three kinds of bees. The queen is the only one that lays eggs, and at the peak of spring she may lay as many as 1,500 a day. She can live for four or five years. A worker needs 21 days to grow from an egg into an adult, then spends about a week as a nurse bee feeding the young and another week on hive duties before she begins to forage. In summer most workers die at six to eight weeks of age, while bees raised in the fall survive until spring. Drones are the males. They cannot sting, do no work in the hive and are driven out as winter approaches.

C. Foragers collect nectar, pollen, water and propolis, a resin from tree buds that bees use to seal small gaps in the hive. Nectar is carried home in a honey sac called the crop, where enzymes begin turning it into honey, the colony's main carbohydrate food. Bees can fly as far as 12 kilometres but usually feed within 3 kilometres of the hive. On each trip a bee tends to visit one kind of plant, which moves pollen between flowers of the same species. In 2021, Canada's agriculture department estimated that honeybee pollination added about $3.18 billion a year to Canadian harvests.

D. The varroa mite is a parasite that attacks only honeybees, feeding on both developing and adult bees. It arrived in British Columbia in 1990. Without treatment an infested colony will die, and wiping out the mite is not realistic, so beekeepers try to keep its numbers low. The wounds it makes also let viruses into a bee's body. Since 2007, provincial apiarists have surveyed beekeepers every year about colonies lost over the winter. For the winter of 2024 to 2025, the national loss was 39.3 per cent, well above the average of 27.7 per cent for the years from 2007 to 2024.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
Removing the pest completely is considered unrealistic, so the goal is to limit how many there are.

- 2.
The single female that produces all the colony's young can survive for several years.

- 3.
The pest was brought into British Columbia by bees shipped in from another country.

- 4.
In one winter, more colonies died than was usual in earlier years.

- 5.
A gummy material taken from plants is used to plug little holes in the nest.

- 6.
Using its sting usually costs a bee its life, so the act benefits the colony, not the individual.

- 7.
Young workers care for developing bees before they start gathering food outside.

- 8.
The bees that are unable to sting grow larger than the queen.

- 9.
Workers that emerge in autumn stay alive far longer than their summer sisters.

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