Our Best Insect Friend : BEE

Honeybees are colonial insects which live in a hive. The hive contains a single queen whose eggs are fertilized by a few males called drones. The worker bees guard the hive, feed the larvae, the queen and most importantly, forage to gather pollen and nectar. Honeybees are essentially social insects. They work together in a highly structured social order


The three classes of honeybees
Workers: the female bees that collect nectar and pollen from flowers.
Queens: larger in size than workers (the female bee that lays the egg).
Drones or males: larger than the workers but without sting.


What is honey?

Honey is a light yellowish brown colour liquid, sweet in taste containing glucose. It
is rich in proteins, carbohydrates, minerals like calcium, phosphorous and iron, along with Vitamin B and C.


Interesting facts about honey

• Honey contains about 18 percent water and is therefore soluble in water.
• A honeybee makes 154 trips for one teaspoon of honey.
• To gather a pound of honey, a bee flies a distance which is more than three times around the world. It takes two million flowers to make one pound of honey.
• The flowers from which the nectar is gathered determines the flavour and colour of honey.
• A bee colony produces 60 to 100 pounds of honey a year.

Do u Know ?

A queen bee uses her stinger to sting only another queen bee. She never uses it on workers,
drones, or people. The queen’s stinger, moreover, is smooth and sabre-shaped, not
barbed, as other bees stingers are. Thus she, unlike all other bees, can sting repeatedly without
hurting herself.

The language of honeybees

In 1919 a scientist, Karl von Frisch, noted that when the bees returned to their hive from a foraging expedition, they performed a kind of dance. He discovered that this dance was the language of the bees, for it communicated information about the location of plants on which the worker had found food to other bees in the hive. They, in turn, performed a similar dance on their
return to the hive. In this way, the bees managed to locate and feed off flowers, perhaps up to 3.2km away from the hive.



Food of honeybees

The food of the honeybee is naturally honey, which is the nectar extracted from pollen grains of flowers. Bees adapt their body structure in a way suitable for extraction of honey. They produce
honey by gathering nectar from the flower blossoms having more than 15 percent sugar content. The nectar is stored in a sac, to which digestive enzymes are added, and the sucrose in the nectar gets converted to glucose and fructose. When the bee returns to the hive, it spits up the nectar and transfers it to another worker, who takes it to the honeycomb and evaporates it by fanning her wings. What is left, is honey! Once the honey is aged, the comb is sealed by wax to prevent spoiling. In a beehive, only one and half ounces of wax are used to build a comb that will hold

four pounds of honey.


Uses of honey in our everyday life

• It is used in baking cakes, pastries etc.
• Used in candies and preparing fruit creams. 
• Mixed in breakfast cereals.
• It is mixed with wine and many fermented drinks and beverages.
• It is used to preserve fruits.
• Sweets are prepared with honey.
• Used as a face pack to give an added glow to human skin.
• It has been used in the treatment of burns and cuts as it has mild antiseptic properties.
• A teaspoonful of honey, if mixed with few drops of lemon and extract of ginger, helps in curing cough and cold.
• Use honey for an ice cream or any biscuit topping.
• Try using honey instead of granulated sugar.
• A teaspoon of honey if mixed in a glass of lukewarm water and lemon juice, cures constipation (to be taken on empty stomach).
• Honey helps in keeping the teeth and gums clean. It also gives shine to the teeth if applied daily.
• One or two teaspoons of honey, if mixed with a cup of warm milk, and taken before going to bed, ensures a sound sleep.

Not only honey, but bee wax is also very useful. It is used for making candles, cosmetics, furniture
as well as artificial flowers and fruits. Considering the medicinal and nutritional qualities of honey, we can say that honeybees are one of the most wonderful gifts of nature to mankind.





What is a honeyguide?

This is a small bird which feeds upon the honey from the bees and wasps nests in the tropics. The bird is unable to break open these nests itself, so has evolved an ingenious method of
obtaining its food. When the honeyguide spots a likely looking nest, it makes an alarm
call which is recognized by a honey badger, a lumbering animal which also feeds on honey. The badger breaks open the nest with its strong claws, and both badger and bird get themselves a meal.










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