The Amazing Honey Bee

Honey bees with pollen on their legs

Honey bees are truly amazing creatures.  They are called the most useful insect in the world.  One third of all the food that we eat is pollinated by honey bees.

Bees gather pollen.  They may visit as many as 50 to 100 flowers each trip.  In the process, they pollinate the flowers and help them to make more fruits and vegetables, like apples, oranges, almonds, and tomatoes. 

They also take nectar from flowers to feed their young.  Bees make honey from nectar.  It takes 5,000 flower visits for bees to make one teaspoon of honey. 

Here is what the inside of our beehive looks like...

Bee keepers raise bees to harvest honey and to pollinate crops.  During the summer, beekeepers take the extra honey that the bees make from the hive.  They cut off the waxy top from the honeycomb and drain the honey into jars.  When we harvest our honey, we'll tell you all about it!

Each beehive colony can have as many as 60,000 bees during the summer.  The colony needs as many bees as possible to gather honey for winter.  They must have at least 70 pounds of honey stored in their hive for the winter months.  Beekeepers must be careful not to take too much honey during harvest so that the bees will have plenty to eat when it is cold.

Bees have been mysteriously dying at an alarming rate over the past few years.  Scientists have become bee detectives to determine why the bees are dying.  If you would like to read more about bee detectives, check out this great book from your library:  The Hive Detectives:  Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe by Loree Griffin Burns.  

We found some fun activities to help you learn more about bees and honey.  Just click on one of these links:

• Bee Activity Book
• Bee Nutty, Bee Cool, Bee Fit  (learn how healthy honey is to eat!)
• Honey Bee Life Cycle

If you would like to read more about our amazing honey bees, check out this book from your library:  The Life and Times of the Honeybee by Charles Micucci.

Fun Bee Facts

Fun Facts about Bees

• One third of all the food that we eat is pollinated by bees.
• In a bee’s short lifetime, she flies the equivalent of one and one-half times around the circumference of the earth.
• Bees can fly as fast as 15 miles per hour.
• It takes 5,000 flower visits for bees to make one teaspoon of honey.
• A bee can only sting once. When she stings, her stinger remains in her victim’s flesh. She dies shortly thereafter.
• A queen bee can lay up to 3,000 eggs per day.

We are Bee Keepers!

Missy at the BeeWeaver Apiary

Today we went to an apiary near Navasota, Texas.  An apiary is a bee farm.  We bought a hive of bees for Opa and Omi's farm.  We will take care of the bees together.  When it is harvest time, we will share the extra honey that the bees make.

We loaded the bee hive in the back of our pickup.  When we arrived at the farm, we placed the bees on the platform in their new home.

Opa and David move the bees to their new home.

The next morning, we looked at each frame inside the beehive.  We wanted to make sure that the bees were healthy.  To keep from getting stung by the bees, we wore special hats with veils.  We wore thick clothes and put rubber bands around our wrists and ankles to keep the bees from crawling inside our clothing. 

David lights the bee smoker.

David smokes the bees.

We also lit a smoker.  Then we smoked the bees.  Bees send out an attack alarm from their tentacles.  The smoke keeps the bees from communicating with each other.  

Opa and David check each bee frame.

What a bee frame looks like...

We are happy to report that nobody got stung!

Missy checks out our new bee hive.

In our next post, we will tell you more about our amazing bees!