bee facts
How do bees make honey? Bees collect nectar from flowers, which is then turned into honey by a combination of the bee's digestive enzymes, and evaporation. Taste and colour of honey is directly related to what flowers or nectar the bees are collecting at the time. A honeybee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers during one flight before heading back to the hive. A total of about 4 million individual flowers need to be tapped in order to produce 1 kg of honey.
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Where does beeswax come from? On the underside of the bee's abdomen there are eight glands that secrete liquid wax. As the wax hardens it forms small flakes that are then removed by the bee with its hind legs and brought up to the bee's mandibles. Here, it is chewed into a malleable form where it is then used to build comb. To give you an idea of just how small these flakes are, 500 grams of wax equates to over half a million of these flakes.
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How do honey bees carry pollen? Honey bees carry pollen back to the hive in a small "basket" of fine hairs on the outside of their hind legs. As the bee scrapes pollen off its body, hairs on the leg collect the pollen. When the basket is full the bee will return to the hive and unload the pollen "pellets" out of the baskets into a cell. The house bees then take care of packing the pollen down inside the cell until it's needed later for food.
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Honeycomb? Did you know that the honey bee needs to collect approx 10kg of honey to make about 1kg of beeswax. Bees make the honeycomb first, called drawing out the frames. Once drawn out the queen will lay her eggs in the base of the honeycomb cell. Nurse bees look after the eggs and feed the larvae until they have hatched. After this worker bees fill the honeycomb with excess honey and pollen which is used to feed the hive over the winter period.
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Types of Bees in the hive? There are three types of bees in each colony, the queen bee, the worker bee and the drone. The worker bee and the queen bee are both female, and the drone is male. Only the queen bee can reproduce, laying eggs. There is only 1 queen bee per hive and between 200-1000 drones depending on the time of the year. The rest of the bees are the female worker bees which can number up to 50000 at peak summer. Worker bees jobs are many and are distinguished by age, they guard the entrance way, clean the hive, collect pollen and nectar, make and repair honeycomb, feed and look after the larvae and young brood and look after and feed the queen. The drone’s only job is to mate with the queen and the queen's only job is to lay eggs.