*Bees produce honey by gathering nectar from flowers with their long tongues and storing it in honey stomachs.
*When the honey stomach is full, a bee will return to the hive and regurgitate the nectar into an empty cell in the hive.
*Worker bees then add certain enzymes to the nectar, and as the water evaporates, it becomes honey.
• A typical beehive contains one queen bee, a few drones and thousands of worker bees. The queen is the female bee that lays the eggs. Workers are unmated female offspring; drones are male offspring.
• During the mating flight, several drones will deposit as many as 90 million sperm in the queen's oviducts. The queen then stores and uses the sperm when laying eggs. She determines the gender of her offspring by deciding which eggs will be fertilized.
• Bees build a honeycomb — a mass of six-sided cells made of wax — at the center of the hive.
• A queen can lay as many as 1,500 eggs during a 24-hour period.
• The honeycomb is used to raise young bees and to store food. The center of the comb, known as the brood nest, is where eggs and developing bees are kept. Honey and nectar are stored in cells around the brood nest.
• When a hive becomes overcrowded, the queen's egg-laying ability diminishes and worker bees build cells for new queens.
• The old queen and many of the workers will leave the hive as a swarm, leaving some workers behind to care for the new queens and larvae. The swarm will cluster around a post or a branch while scouts look for a suitable location for a new colony. Beekeepers will try to provide that location with an empty hive.
• Bees in each hive have their own special odor. Guard bees are stationed at the door of the hive to prevent bees from other hives from entering. Bees also alert other workers in the hive to good locations for gathering nectar by doing a type of "dance" that indicates the direction and the distance.
• Modern beehives are wooden boxes that contain removable, drawer-like sections that hang 3/8-inch apart. Bees can pass through the sections to all parts of the hive, and sections can be moved around as they get filled with honey.
• A typical colony can include up to 60,000 bees. Bees protect themselves by stinging their foes.
*A sting can be life-threatening to people who are allergic to bee venom.
*The venom sac pumps a mixture of melittin, histamine and other enzymes to the stinger. As the stinger pierces the skin of a person or animal, the pump goes to work. A barb anchors the stinger in the victim's body, and as the bee
pulls away, the bee leaves the stinger and venom sac behind. The abdominal rupture this causes, kills the bee. When bees sting other insects, such as a honey plundering moth, the stinger pulls through the insect's body and remains intact. Thus, the sting is not fatal to the bee. The first beekeepers used hollow logs, pots or upside-down baskets as their hives. European farmers began building straw "skeps" that looked like upside-down baskets, and that is the origin of the beehive symbol we know today.
Honey history facts:
• Fossilized bees as much as 80 million years old have been found trapped in amber.
• Honey has been used and appreciated since ancient times. The ancient Egyptians are believed to have used honey in embalming.
• The Bibles promises the Israelites a land "flowing with milk and honey."
• A jar of honey on the table was once considered a status symbol and a sign of great wealth.
• Researchers say honey-producing bees originated in Africa. In 1848, the beehive was chosen as the temporary emblem for the State of Deseret. In 1959, Utah officially declared the beehive as its state emblem because it symbolized industry, Utah's Motto.
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