Honeybees the “bee’s knees”

There are more than 3,500 species of wild bees in North America. Honeybees are herbivores - meaning they eat only plant materials. Many Native American Indians used honey and other bee by-products as medicine and food long before Europeans brought their honeybee “Apis Mellifera,” to America in the seventeenth century. Many still use honey and beeswax. Dictionaries have the spelling of honeybee as one word; however, entomologists use the two-word name, honey bee.  You can safely use either one, as they are both correct.

Honeybees have provided humans with many commercial uses of honey and beeswax. Honeybees consume about 17-20 pounds of honey to produce each pound of beeswax. The importance of bees led to a large beekeeping industry. While there are many beekeepers across North America, wild bees still occur widely.

Honeybees are social insects with each hive divided into three types of bees. They are capable of communicating with each other by touching each other’s antennae.  They also have special dances that let other bees know where good sources of flowers are that have pollen and nectar. This dance s called the “waggle dance”. A colony may contain 40,000 to 60,000 bees in the spring and summer. Worker bees are the only bees most of us see. These worker bees are sexually undeveloped females.  These worker bees gather food, build the hive, clean the hive, protect the hive, circulate air in the hive by beating their wings, and they perform many other duties.

The food they look for is nectar and pollen from flowers - even tree flowers. The pollen is collected on pollen baskets located on the tibiae (the midsection of its legs). When you see a bee’s pollen basket filled to the brim its a pretty awesome sight. It is believed that this pollen basket is how the phrase “the bees knees” originated. Pollen that is not solidly on the bee’s legs falls off and pollinates the next flower it lands on. Honey bees are very important as one-third of human’s diet of fruits, vegetables, and legumes comes through insect pollination.

Male bees are called drones. Several hundred drones live in each hive. When winter comes the drones are driven off the honeycombs and forced to starve to death. As they weaken, the workers remove them to the outside to die. This is a necessary act to insure survival, through the harsh winter months, for the rest of the hive. A few drones occasionally survive and winter with the rest of the hive. The hive survives the winter on stored honey and pollen. Amazingly, bees maintain a temperature of 92-94 degrees Fahrenheit inside the core of their hive even if the temperature outside is 110 or 40 below freezing.

The male bees, the drones, are the largest bees in the colony. They are heavy bodied and their body has sort of a rectangular shape. They have huge eyes that meet at the top of their heads.  Drones do not have stingers. Drones develop in 24 days from unfertilized eggs. This means they have no fathers, but they do have a grandfather. Drones are fed royal jelly, which gets them ready to fertilize the queens. Their entire purpose is to mate with and fertilize the queens.

There is a great excess of drones to insure that queens in all areas are fertilized. The mating takes place in flight. The queen mates with up to 17 drones over a one to two day period of mating flights. This is a onetime occurrence. The mating lasts a lifetime. The queen stores sperm in her spermatheca. In this way she has a lifetime supply, and she never has to mate again.

The queen’s job is a simple one. After the mating flight, she lays eggs that will produce the next generation of bees. The queen bee can control the flow of sperm when fertilizing an egg. In this way she can produce worker bees from the fertilized eggs and males/drones from unfertilized eggs. This unusual genetic sex determination process is known as haplodiploidy. There is only one queen per hive. The queen lays 600 to 1,500 eggs each day during her four to five year lifetime. This production of eggs everyday can equal her weight.

The queen bee is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees. If she dies, the workers will feed one of the worker bees, royal jelly. This special food enables the worker to develop into a fertile queen. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behavior of the rest of the hive. While some of us are allergic to the sting of a bee and their sting can hurt, it is important to realize that honeybees are of great value to humans and Mother Earth.

A strange observation some 30 years ago was made by the Berlin Cancer Institute. The institutes found that there was not one case or record of a beekeeper suffering from cancer. It is believed that the stings they received from the bees were the prime reason. Some practitioners to treat arthritis also use bees’ stings today. Honey has been used since the beginning of time as a topical dressing for wounds. It is a great dressing, as microbes cannot live in honey. Honey also produces hydrogen peroxide.

Fermented honey is called Mead, and is said to be the most ancient fermented beverage. The term “honey moon” originated from the Norse who drank large quantities of Mead during their first month of marriage. While experts say Mead is the oldest, I know that the some Native Indian Medicine men, in the Southwest, ferment/fermented syrup from the saguaro cactus fruit to be consumed during some of their ceremonies. Perhaps they have done this for as long as or longer than the drink Mead has been made. I believe everything known and written today about science can and probably will be changed some time in the future. The things written about science, history, etc. are written by man, and we all know the mistakes man is capable of and has made.