We love honey. Honey bees make honey! Without the bees, where would our honey come from? Bees are always so busy.
Honey bees are pollinators.
Bees transfer pollen between the plants allowing the seeds to form. These seeds eventually give us fruit, vegetables and flowers. Honey bees are mustard yellow and brown. They have stocky bodies that are covered with many hairs to which the pollen sticks.
Honey bees are native to Africa and Europe, but we have a lot of these bees on this island.
Honey bees were taken to the Americas from Europe in the early- to mid-1600s by English and Spanish settlers.
Bees have five eyes and six legs. The bees that harvest nectar and pollen from flowering plants sting – they have a stinger. Drones or male bees do not have a stinger.
The bees’ home is called a hive – they live in large colonies in these hives.
There are three sections to the hive. Each section is made up of special bees.
An average beehive can hold around 50,000 bees.
Queen: The queen rules over the whole hive. She lays the eggs that will grow up to be the next generation of bees. The queen fertilizes each egg as it is being laid. The queen occasionally will not fertilize an egg. The non-fertilized eggs develop into male drones. The queen has a special sort of chemical she gives off that tells the other bees how they should behave.
Workers: The workers are lady bees. Their role is to fly out to look for food – that is the pollen and the nectar from flowers. They also build and protect the hive and clean and circulate air through the hive by beating their wings.
All the bees you see are the Worker bees.
Drones: The drones are the male bees whose job is to mate with the queen. Hundreds of drones live in each hive in spring and summer. In winter, the drones have to find somewhere else to live as there are not enough flowers for the worker bees to get food from.
The honey they make in spring and summer is stored for food in the winter. The bees actually make more honey than they need to feed them through winter. Humans are lucky because they can eat the extra honey and everyone is happy.
If the queen bee dies, the lady worker bees chose a new queen from a newly hatched baby bee. To make it a queen bee, they feed it a special food called “royal jelly.” This enables the new baby to develop into a fertile queen.
Honey bees fly very fast – about 25km per hour. They flap their wings 200 times per second! Can you flap your arms that fast or that often?
Bees have an excellent sense of smell! They use their sense of smell to communicate within the hive, and when outside, they use that excellent sense of smell to recognize different types of flowers. Each day, the bees might fly several miles from the hive just to get nectar! They really are “busy bees”!
A worker bee only lives for five to six weeks. She only produces a tiny amount of honey – just about a twelfth of a teaspoon.
The queen bee can live up to five years. During the summer months, she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day. She needs to so that the eggs can turn into baby bees, because the grown bees don’t live that long – it is a cycle of life!
Honey bees return to the hive and do a sort of dance in a figure-of-eight. They waggle their bodies in a special dance move – this tells the other bees where they should go to find good flowers with lots of pollen.
Inside every hive are cells made by the bees. The cells are made of a wax-like substance. The pattern of the cells forms what we call a honeycomb. The honey bees fly away from the hive and return with the nectar from the flowers.
They use long tongues to suck up the sweet flower nectar; it is almost like sucking on a straw. They have two stomachs – one stomach, the honey stomach, stores the nectar that they collect and then fly back to the hive with. It can take over a thousand flowers to fill the honey stomach.
When the honey stomach is full, the bees return to the hive and spit up the nectar into the mouth of the younger female worker bees.
The worker bees munch on the nectar for about half an hour, chewing it like gum and breaking it down with special chemicals, making it easier for the bees to eat. Then they deposit the chewed nectar in the wax cells that make up the honeycomb. The honeycomb that forms the inside of the hive is the bee’s food pantry.
Honey contains a lot of good things in it. It is the only type of natural food source that contains everything that humans need to be nourished. Bees have to work very hard to make just one pound of honey. They need to collect nectar from around two million flowers and fly more than 55,000 miles!
There are not as many bee hives in the world anymore. This is very worrying. We need bees, so we need to make sure we have lots of plants with flowers that are rich in nectar for the bees to get the pollen from.
When you are next out shopping, look to see if you can find honey. If you can find the honey, see if you can find it in three different forms. Look for liquid honey, creamed honey and honey with a piece of honeycomb in the jar.
