The demand for beeswax in personal care and pharmaceutics will remain high due to consumer demand for natural additives, organic ingredients and use of eco-friendly resources while those customers are turning away from chemicals and the side effects they are believed to cause. Another reason is just the naturally protective covering, soothing nature of wax itself.

Apitherapy is the medicinal use of products from bees includi ng venom , propolis, honey, pollen , and royal jelly. The last 3 are well-known for their use as nutritional supplements or in reducing allergic reactions. The first, venom, is used in research and in rheumatism and allergy therapeutics. For skin and wound care, honey is used in treatment of burns. Also, propolis in tinctures is used on wounds and to reduce irritation. Both propolis and honey are used with wax in

It's not surprising that bees would be attracted by a static electric charge, given their sensitive antennae and the hairs covering their bodies. The static charge causes deflection of the plumose hairs and is sensed by antennal mechanosensors. This article explains the mechanisms of this electrical attraction in detail: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607426113

If a forager goes very far from the hive, she must carry enough nectar in her crop for her to consume to make the trip out. If collecting pollen, she may need to use some of that nectar to help form and mold that pollen onto her corbiculae, and maybe even fuel her trip back.

The fat bees (bees with larger fat bodies) produced by the colony last fall are old now, putting the last of their life’s energy into raising the brood that replaces them. This changeover has already happened for many beekeepers in Western Washington. A hive has truly overwintered when that first brood successfully emerges as young, fuzzy new adults ready to take over from the aging, dying winter bees. Congratulations to all the beekeepers who had the patience to NOT open hiv

Honey bees are examples of super efficiency in the insect world in just about everything they do. Take flight for example. A fly (Order Diptera) has a wing beat of 62,000 per minute but a bee has greater maneuverability and range at less than 1/5 that number of beats or strokes per minute, about 11,500, or almost 200 wing strokes per second. For how a bee does it, see How Bees Fly demonstrated by Simon Rees at the National Honey Show - https://youtu.be/9UKo3NKuLkk . He show

As beekeepers know, every hive is different and some are more intent on one task or another: raising brood, making honey or collecting pollen. Although a colony may only eat about 44 to 65 lbs per year, they have been detected collecting up to 125 pounds per year. Some strains of bees have been selected and experimentally developed by researchers to collect pollen to the exclusion of the amount of honey needed to sustain the hive through winter.

Many native bees species or other pollinator species depend on one or a few species of flowers for their diet. The monarch butterfly is famous for its dependence on milkweed. Without milkweed, it would cease to exist. In contrast, the honey bee can utilize an extremely large range of pollen and nectar sources. However, when a forager is collecting nectar or pollen, she will stick to one type of flower to collect her load, even returning to the same branch of the same plant to

Most of the foragers collect either honey or pollen, with a few specializing in water or propolis. Only about 15% of foragers have been observed in research to collect both honey and pollen on the same foraging trip. And people think all bees look the same!

One reason given for varietal size difference of the pollen baskets on returning foragers is the stickiness of the pollen. Some flowering plants rely on insects such as our beloved bees or other animal vectors while others rely on wind to transfer pollen from flower to flower. Wind transfers small, non-sticky pollen best but plants relying on insect vectors may be more successful with production of sticky pollen. Of course, honey bee foragers can improve the stickiness of the

Pollen is not all yellow or orange; bees find and collect quite a range of colors. This is particularly noticeable late in the summer in Western Washington State, when beekeepers see many colors of pollen as the bees pack away pollen stores for winter. When there is no major nectar flow to collect, a hive often turns more toward collecting pollen. The bees fill entire frames with pollens, often of many colors. At this time of the year, some pollen baskets are very visible on

Honey bees are not the fastest flying insects. In contrast, it appears to be generally agreed that dragonflies are among the fastest insects known at over 30mph being repeatedly measured. Honey bees are considered to fly at a maximum speed of around 15 mph, but in defense of the honey bee, look at all the duties of a worker bee – scouting and gathering nectar and pollen, hive defense, etc. Setting speed records is not part of her life’s work. However, that difference

It is believed that worker bees don’t sleep until they are foraging age. Until then they are cleaning, nursing the brood, tending the queen, heating the hive, warming the brood, processing the nectar and pollen gathered during the day and distributing food to all hive residents. No wonder they have no time to sleep! However, eventually the worker bee body has aged and changed to foraging after passing through a progression of the duties throughout her life. Those duties chang

If the honey bee queen can lay over 1000 eggs per day during spring and summer when the hive is most populous and most active, the bees from those eggs must die at a similar rate some weeks later. Why do you not see that many dead bees per day in or near the hive? Worker bees only live about 6 or 7 weeks in spring or summer so 100s of bees must be dying every day! However, bees have very hygienic behaviors. One of these is that any bee that dies in the hive is removed by the

Throughout the world, people eat insects in their egg, larval, pupal or adult stages, a behavior known as entomophagy. However, the only insect that produces a food that it eats and that humans consume as well, are the honey bees.

Studies of the brain of a honey bee, only about a cubic millimeter in volume, yield valuable information in medical research, information that can improve our brain health and our lives. The honey bee brain has the highest neuropile density of any animal. How can research on an insect brain be useful in human medicine? We use an animal model such as the honey bee, simpler in some ways and yet more focused, to understand perception, information processing, learning, etc.

Bees are fuzzy, not just covered by hairs, but covered by plumose (branched) hairs which trap particulates. This trait aids their collection of pollen and its transfer from flower to flower. However, these feathery hairs of foraging honey bees (and other bees) also trap wind-borne particulates in flight, making them ideal for the study ­­of air pollutant particles.

“Mad honey" is honey from the nectar of certain plants, particularly the Ericaceae family, which includes rhododendron, pieris and other genera that might sound familiar to gardeners. Symptoms of poisoning by ingesting this honey include dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, hypersalivation, nausea, vomiting and paresthesia, cardiac complications and possibly death. However, in the United States, honey bees have other sources of forage and rarely collect the nectar of

Worker bee life span during summer may only be 7 weeks, about 4 of them flying. During the winter some of the workers live 5 months or more. Drones live only one season if they fail to mate. If they mate, they die in the act. Queens have been shown to sometimes live for years but the average life span of queens appears to be decreasing.

By volume, weight, or space occupied on frames. The size or weight difference between strains of honey bees – Italian, Russian, Carniolan, Caucasian - is minimal. So a half cup of bees is about 300, a pound is about 3500 and a densely covered deep frame is 1500 or more.