A Little About Bees

Honey bees are essential for the success of food production. For thousands of years honey bees have played a central role in the development of backyard gardens, commercial farms and in the wild. Honey bees provide us with honey and honey is the only food eaten by man that is produced by an insect. Honey is also loaded with nutrition … vitamins, minerals, enzymes and essential nutrients.

Honey is considered a complete food because of these properties. Not only is honey good for us but the economic value of honey bees is measured in the 10’s of millions of dollars.

There is a real order to things in the bee hive. The 80,000 or so bees making up the typical hive live a very structured life with duties and tasks arranged by age.

The queen is the center of the activity in the hive. It’s her job to make sure there are more and more bees working in the hive and foraging for food.

The queen is the largest bee in the hive and can live as long as 5 years though a shorter life span is more typical. The queen is the only bee in the hive to lay eggs and she can lay up to 1500 eggs per day and almost a million eggs in her lifetime.

Worker bees are the heavy lifters in the hive and are responsible for all of the activities surrounding the success of the hive. The role of the worker bee, all of whom are female, is to provide for the caref feeding and grooming of the queen.
The male honeybees are called ‘Drones’ and are slightly larger compared to the worker bees. Their only job is to mate with the Queen bee and they die immediately after the mating process is completed.

While the honey bee is a very hard working insect they do enjoy a temperature controlled home. Through their hard work they’re able to maintain the temperature of the inside the hive at a comfortable temperature of 93 degrees. That’s year round, rain or shine, hot or cold the hive remains at a pretty constant temperature. Honey bees are very well designed.

So well designed that they’re not supposed to fly at least that’s what the engineers say. But fly they do for up to six miles at a stretch at about 15 miles per hour. Those fragile wings beat up to 200 times per second. The mystery of bee flight was not understood until only a few years ago.

Did you know?

Swarming is an instinctive part of the annual life cycle of a honeybee colony. In fact … honey bees will swarm here in these warmer climes several times per year. This swarming activity is a natural way the colony reproduces itself. Bees in a swarm are usually docile and not included to sting or attack. Usually, within a few days the bees have moved on to a more permanent home.

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