About:
-Bees
-Parts of a Bee
-Extracting Honey
-Parts of a Hive
-Beekeeping Tools
Quiz yourself!
So, what is a honeybee?
A honeybee is a small, fuzzy, yellow to orange and black striped, flying insect in the same family as wasps and ants. Most honeybees are about three quarters of an inch long and live in colonies of more than 50 thousand other bees. They collect pollen and nectar from plants and store it in hexagonal chambers called cells. Many cells make up comb. The nectar that they don’t eat they turn into the delicious liquid we call honey. Many people keep bees, and professional beekeepers can have more than a thousand hives. The movable frame hive, invented by L.L. Langstroth in 1851, is the most widely used device for keeping bees. Many people think that the only thing bees do that is useful to humans is make honey, but really, without the bees to pollinate them, many crops couldn’t bear fruit. There are three types of bee in each hive. The female worker bees forage, make honey, guard the hive, and take care of the queen and the young. The queen lays eggs and only leaves the hive once. The drones’ main purpose in life is to help queens reproduce. A worker bee may live up to six weeks in the summer and longer over the winter. A drone may live a whole summer. A queen usually lives from 1 to 4 years. Often times we confuse bees with yellowjackets and wasps. An easy way to tell the difference between a yellowjacket and a honeybee is that usually a yellowjacket’s stripes are bright yellow and honeybee stripes are often a duller, more orange-yellow. Also, honeybees have the appearance of being fuzzy, and yellowjackets are more armored and shiny.
