Learn About the Interesting & Exciting Social Insect
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Want info about bees? We have got it covered. Even before recorded history, man was gathering honey from honey bees living in hollow trees. But honey wasn’t the only reason for keeping honey bees because man soon learned that the honey bee was an interesting and exciting social insect. The mystery and fascination of the hive, how honey bees live, work, and reproduce has intrigued man ever since.
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The Honey Bee Colony - About bees
The story behind what appears to be the casual movement of honey bees from flower to flower is the discovery of an industrious and tireless society. Honey bees are social insects. They band together and divide labor. The honey bees society is made up of three types of individuals with sharply defined duties and functions. The population of the colony numbers from about 7,000 in mid-winter to over 70,000 in late summer and consists of one Queen, several hundred drones, and thousands of Workers.
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How Honey Bees Work
Most all flowers produce a sweet liquid to attract insects, primarily honey bees, so that pollination can take place and assure the survival of that plant species. Honey bees make honey from nectar found inside the flower blossom. Fieldworker honey bees collect the nectar and carry it back to the hive in pouches within their body. The fieldworker honey bee gives the nectar to young worker honey bees back in the hive, who then place the nectar in a beeswax comb made up of six-sided cells. The excess water is then evaporated from the nectar. After a period of time, the nectar is transformed into pure honey. Some workers collect nectar, some collect pollen and some do both. In terms of economic value, the workers that collect pollen are the most important to you and I. Honey is just the sweet, secondary reward that we collect from honey bees. If honey bees ceased to exist today, about one-third (1/3) of all foods we eat would disappear. Why? Because of pollination. The worker that collects pollen from the flowers packs it into pellets on her hind legs. As she travels from flower to flower, the pollen brushes off onto special pollen receiving structure called the stigma in the center of the flower. This process is called pollination and allows all flowering crops to reproduce. The outcome is fruit, vegetables, nuts, and a wide variety of seeds that are used for human and animal foods. For this reason, many people keep bees on farms and near gardens.
Uses & Facts About Pure Honey
- Raw honey has many, many health benefits with dozens of scientific studies to back them up. Check out the research yourself and talk to your health care professional about the benefits.
- Raw honey is liquid when bottled. Within weeks, it could become crystallized at room temperature and it often looks murky or milky. This does not mean the honey has gone bad. Different floral varieties crystallize at different speeds and a few non at all.
- Raw honey contains small amounts of natural bee pollen, royal jelly, propolis and beeswax, the benefits are plentiful.
- To produce a single pound of honey, a colony of bees must collect nectar from approximately 2 million flowers and fly over 55,000 miles.
- On average, a honey bee produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey over the course of its life. To put that into perspective, two tablespoons of honey would be enough to fuel a bee’s entire flight around the world.
- Honey’s depth of flavor is determined by the source of the nectar it was made from. The darkness or lightness of certain honey as well as the fragrance varies as well.
- The environment depends on the pollination that occurs when honey bees gather nectar. Bees pollinate $20 billion worth of U.S. crops each year, and approximately one third of all food eaten by Americans is either directly or indirectly derived from honey bee pollination.
- Honey contains enzymes that help your body digest food, which in turn, helps keep our immune systems working properly. Honey is also a healthy alternative to giving yourself that energy boost when you need it!
- Honey is also used in many skin and hair care health products.
Uses & Facts About Pure Beeswax
Beeswax can be utilized in making lip balm, lip gloss, hand creams, healing salves, mustache wax, hair pomades, and moisturizers; add your own essential oils to make your own custom products. Pure beeswax carries antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and antibacterial properties that are essential in fighting chapped skin and bacterial infections that tend to affect us most in the dry, winter months. It also forms a protective barrier by sealing moisture in our skin without smothering and clogging up the pores. Candle making has long involved the use of beeswax. Beeswax candles are often superior to other wax candles because they are meant to burn cleaner, brighter, longer, and don’t bend. Beeswax also smells great when burned without any added chemicals or scents as it’s naturally aromatic from the honey and flower nectar. You can add essential oils if you choose to customize your scent, but not required. Beeswax never goes bad and can be heated and reused.
