Honey Bees

Honey bees have to go through a long process to make honey. The house bee and the field bee are involved in the process. First, the field bee goes out and collects nectar, which it stores in an internal honey sac. They bring it back to the hive and transfer it to the house bee. tongue-to-tongue. Then the house bee spreads a drop of nectar on the roof of a cell in a comb. During the next couple of days, other house bees fan their wings over the nectar so that the moisture evaporates (nectar is 80% water and honey is 19% water). Finally, more house bees cover every cell filled with modified nectar with a thin layer of wax.

Honey is a product that honey bees make. Humans use it for many different purposes. It can be a substitute for sugar in many foods. You can make ice cream with honey, but you would have to lower the temperature in the freezer because honey lowers the freezing point. Honey has a greater sweetening ability that sugar doesn’t have. One cup of honey weighs twelve ounces, while one cup of sugar weighs seven ounces.

Honey was also used in various ways in history. Long ago, priests used honey and cakes sweetened by honey in many religious ceremonies. In Roman times, honey was used as widely as sugar is now. It was used for cooking, preserving meats, vegetables, fruits, sauces and dressing. Biblical sources say that honey was the first and last food that Jesus Christ ate on Earth. Muhammad is recorded in the Koran saying that honey is a remedy for all illnesses.

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
By: Isaac Watts, “Against Idleness and Mischief”

Beeswax, a secretion from four glands on the underside of a worker bees’ abdomen, is a very helpful product. Some major uses of beeswax are cosmetics and candle making.

Some minor uses are lotions, cold creams, ointments, salves, lipsticks, rouges, pill coatings, waterproofing, coatings for electrical apparatus, floor and furniture polishes, leather polishes, arts and crafts items, adhesives, crayons, inks, basketball molding, grafting wax, ski wax and ironing wax.

Most of the world’s beeswax comes from Africa. Roman wax tablets were found in Egypt. Persians and Syrians both covered the bodies of important individuals with wax before burial. Beeswax death masks were made by Mme Tussaud for King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette after their execution.

There are two ways to make beeswax candles. There is the dipping method, where the wicks are repeatedly dipped into a pool of melted beeswax. There is also the pouring method, where the wick is suspended and a dipper full of melted wax is poured over it and runs off into a large container below.

Since many of our pollinators are now scarce, we are dependent on the honey bee to pollinate our crops. Pollination starts when a field bee crawls around a plant blossom. The honey bee is dusted with pollen. Then the field bee flies over to another blossom with the pollen in its hair. When the bee lands, the pollen falls onto this blossom’s stigma. Now a fruit, vegetable or other crop can grow.

Farmers actually rented colonies of bees to pollinate their crops. Even though other insects pollinate crops too, honey bees are one of the few that are synchronized and managed with the development of crops. If honey bees didn’t pollinate, crops wouldn’t be able to grow. Without the pollination from the honey bees there would be one third less crops in the world than there is now.