Bee-trix Potter.

Bee-thoven!

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

A honeycomb.

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

Stingalongs.

Pablo Bee-casso!

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.

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

Bee-witched!

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.

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

“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

Fooling with a bee!

Fooling with a bee!

A bee in a submarine!

The shortest distance between two buzz-stops!