Honey Bees

A honey bee is a close relative of an ant and wasp that is a flying insect. They’re found on every
continent of earth, except for Antarctica. Honey bees have to gather nectar from 2 million flowers to
make 1 pound of honey. At least 1 bee has to fly around 90,000 miles/three times around the globe to make that one pound of honey. They communicate by dancing to each other. Female bees are
the only ones that do all the work because the male bees are just there to mate.

Appearance:

The honey bees measure up to around 15mm long and are the colours light brown, yellow-ish and black-ish. They’re usually oval-shaped creatures with  golden-yellow colours and brown bands. The body colour of honey bees varies between species and some honey bees have predominantly black bodies almost all honey bees have varying dark-to-light. The light and dark stripes serve a very meaningful and strong purpose for the survival of honey bees. The 3 main body parts of a honey bee is the head, thorax and abdomen. The head contains the eyes antennae, and feeding structure, the thorax contains wings, legs and muscles involved in movement. Finally the abdomen which has seven segments and contains female reproductive organs in the queen, male reproductive organs in the drone, and the stinger in both workers and queen. Unlike other species, that just hide from predators when they’re nearby, the brightly coloured bodies of the honey bee act as a warning to predators or honey robbers of the honey bees’ ability to sting. 

Habitat:

Honey bees natural and original habitat are tropical climates and heavily forested areas. Honey bees thrive in natural or domesticated environments, although they do prefer to live in gardens, woodlands, orchards, meadows and other areas with flowering plants are abundant. Within their natural habitat, honey bees build nests inside tree cavities and under edges to protect themselves from their predators.

Diet:

Bees, bees are colour-sensitive insects that rely on their sense of vision to locate food. They are most commonly seen when they are foraging, which is the process of finding food and water. Bees sometimes fly up to around 6 miles to find food, and are mostly quite far away from home if you see them in your yard or neighbourhood. They are attracted to very sugary things, but mainly/especially attracted to liquid sweets. That’s why when you see them around your yard and you have a whole lot of sweets that’s why they’re hanging around.

Honey:

Honey starts off from the nectar of flowers collected by the bees, which then gets broken down simple sugars store inside the honeycomb. The design of the honeycomb and constant fanning of the bees' wings causes evaporation, creating the sweet liquid honey. Honeys flavour and colour varies based on the colour of the nectar collected by bees; For example, honey made from orange blossom nectar might be light in color, whereas honey from avocado or wildflowers might have a dark amber color.

Bees are declining from starvation and pesticides. People are spraying pesticides on plants to
kill weeds or harmful insects or bacteria. Honey is incredibly healthy and includes enzymes, vitamins,
minerals. It’s the only food that contains “pinocembrin”, an antioxidant associated with improved brain
functioning. They have been producing honey the same way for the past 150 thousand years. Bees
do not pollinate corn, but the corn's pollen makes its way onto flowers and other crops, whereas the
bees are exposed.  

By Roxy

These last couple of weeks for writing we have been doing research on honey bees, because we are going to be getting honey bees at the back of our class.