Sweet Honeybees
The honeybee, one of man's oldest insect friends, gives us honey, beeswax and most important of all, the fertilization of many of our crop bearing plants.
• A colony of bees have to fly almost fifty-five thousand miles and visit over 2 million flowers just to make a single pound of honey. Now that’s a long trip.
• A queen can lay her weight in eggs in one day and 200,000 eggs in a year. The queen is the only sexually developed female in the hive and can live for up to 2 years.
• The honeybee is not born knowing how to make honey; the younger bees are taught by the more experienced ones.
• Unlike other bees, honeybees do not hibernate during cold weather. They last out the cold winters by feeding on stored supplies and sharing their body heat, clustering together in dense packs.
• Honey bees use the sun as a compass to navigate.
• Orchids can make a bee drunk. The bee then becomes disoriented and drops its collected pollen into the flower pollinating it.
• Bees possess five eyes. Honeybees can perceive movements that are separated by 1/300th of a second. Humans can only sense movements separated by 1/50th of a second. Were a bee to enter a movie theater, it would be able to differentiate each individual movie frame being projected. Bees, however, cannot recognize the color red.
• Honeybees are more dangerous than snakes. Bees kill more people each year than all the poisonous snakes combined.
• Honeybees' stingers have a barb which anchors the stinger in the victim's body. The bee leaves its stinger and venom pouch behind and soon dies from abdominal rupture.
• The ability of honeybees to communicate direction and distance from the hive to nectar sources through dance "language" has received widespread attention. The Bee's dancing language consists of two basic dances: a dance in a circle, for indicating sources without telling distance or direction; and a tail-wagging dance in which the exact distance is indicated by a number of straight runs with abdominal wagging--the fewer runs per minute, the farther away the source. Wing vibrations produce sounds at the same rate as the tail wagging and are detected by organs in the legs of other bees. Researchers have developed a robot "bee" that can communicate with other bees in this way.
Honeybees are one of the most recognized insect in the world. Our fascination with the honeybee began when it was discovered how wonderful their honey was to eat. After the discovery was made, we began to write about, raise, and coddle the honeybee in an attempt to convince it not to sting us as we stole honey from its hive.
What is honey? Honey is the thick, golden liquid produced by certain types of bees from the nectar of flowers. Even though many insects collect and consume nectar, only our friend the honeybee refines the process and gives our taste buds a treat. Honey is actually produced for a food supply during the long winter months for the bees as they are active in winter as well as summer. By consuming their stores of honey, the honeybee avoids starvation and survives the harsh cold of winter's breath.
Honeybees have a bright color pattern to warn honey thieves--I mean, predators--that they have a stinger and aren't afraid to use it. The stinger is actually a modified ovipositor (egg laying tube) with a venom sac. Only females have them, so they are the warriors of the colony. Whenever honeybees feel threatened, they swarm and attack with their stingers until the honey thief--oops, predator--runs away.
Honeybees are social insects. This means they like and need to be around other honeybees. They build hives that can house between 20,000 and 80,000 bees at a time. However, not all bees are equal in the hive and belong to three distinct castes--or groups--in the hive hierarchy. These three structural castes are the queen, drones, and workers.
There is only one queen per hive. She has the power and she's not giving it up! Much like the ant colonies, the queen's job is to reproduce, and she takes her work seriously. In her lifespan, which can range from two to eight years, she will produce all the bees needed for the hive. The queen lays 1,500 eggs per day. She can be easily identified since her abdomen is longer than the workers or drones, and she's bigger than they are. She can also sting multiple times. The queen's stinger isn't barbed and she knows it. Of all the bees in a hive, she's the one I wouldn't want to have mad at me.
Drones are the males of the society and can't sting. They don't have a stinger. Their only job in their six week lifespan is to mate with a new queen--if one is born that year. If there are any drones still alive at the end of the season, they are driven out of the hive. As non-essential consumers of precious winter food stores, they aren't seen as important enough to remain within the colony.
Worker bees do all the work for the colony. They build the hive, clean the hive, and collect all the pollen to make the honey. They also do the babysitting and tend to the queen. One of their jobs is temperature regulation inside the hive. Workers are also responsible for defending the hive against thieves--um, predators. Workers, who can live up to a year, are sterile females. Their stingers are barbed, so they can only sting once. After they sting, the worker bee will die as stinging rips the stinger from their bodies and causes their death.
Honeybee Cookies
What You'll Need:
Electric mixer
2 medium bowls
3/4 cup shortening
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup honey
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Plastic wrap
Cookie sheets
Decorations: yellow and black icing, gummy fruit
Step 1: In an electric mixer beat shortening, sugar, and honey at medium speed until fluffy.
Step 2: Add egg and vanilla; mix until well blended.
Step 3: Combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt in medium bowl.
Step 4: Add to shortening mixture, mix at low speed until well blended.
Step 5: Cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate several hours or overnight.
Step 6: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Divide dough into 24 equal sections. Shape each section into oval-shaped ball. Place two inches apart on un-greased cookie sheets.
Step 7: Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool two minutes on cookie sheets. Remove to wire racks; cool completely.
Step 8: Decorate with icings and gummy fruit to create honeybees. Makes two dozen cookies.
Can Bees See Color?
What You'll Need:
Sugar
Water
Pan
Colored paper
Safe scissors
Clear plastic cups
Outdoor table
Heavy washers
Notebook
Step 1: Make nectar to attract bees by mixing one quarter-cup of sugar with one cup of water. Heat the mixture slowly in a pan on the stove until the sugar dissolves. Let the mix cool.
Step 2: Cut squares of colored paper four inches on each side. Use red, orange, yellow, green, blue, deep blue, violet, white, black, and gray.
Step 3: Cut the bottoms out of as many clear plastic cups as you have squares of paper. Tape the squares to the top of an outdoor table. Set one cup bottom on each square. Add a washer to weigh it down, then pour in some nectar.
Step 4: Wait patiently for the bees. Which colors do they land on? To keep track, make a table in your notebook. Every ten minutes, check the experiment. Count the number of bees on each color, and write that down next to each color.
The next time you check, put your counts in another column of boxes. At the end of the day, remove the dishes.
Step 5: The next day, do the experiment again. Do the bees visit their favorite square even if no food is on it?
Step 6: Now confuse the bees. Next to the colored squares, set out gray squares similar in shade to the colored squares. If bees see color, they should land mostly on the colored squares. If they can't, they should visit the gray squares too.
