Keep on Buzzing

Across the United States, honey bees play a very important role in our lives through pollination. Beekeepers who care for these hives are also important, since they ensure that the hives will be strong and healthy and the bees can keep doing their jobs. However, honey bees and beekeepers are facing some problems right now. Because honey bees are so important to us, we must do everything we can to help. What are some ways you can help honey bees?

Honey bees gather food from flowers

A great way to help honey bees is to plant flowers. Honey bees gather food from flowers, so we want to make sure they have a good food supply. Bees like plants such as fruit trees, vegetable plants, herbs, clover, coneflower, black-eyed susans, and sunflowers. Bees only visit one kind of flower per trip, so it is helpful to plant many of the same flowers in one area, instead of only one or two.

      

Honey can be many
different colors!

Another way to help is to support local beekeepers. Beekeepers work hard to make sure that their honey bees are strong and healthy. An easy way to support beekeepers is to buy honey. With 300 different honeys in the US and 3,000 in the world, there is a flavor for every preference! To find a beekeeper near you, visit honeylocator.com.

Teaching preschoolers about bees

It is important for people to understand the benefit of honey bees. A wonderful way to supportbees and beekeepers is to help raise awareness about honey bees in your community. Telling other people about honey bees and encouraging other to do their part to help the bees can make a big impact!

Finally, consider being a beekeeper yourself! There are between 115,000 – 125,000 beekeepers in the United States. It doesn’t matter whether you are a boy or a girl, child or adult, or live in the country or the city – ANYONE can be a beekeeper! Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby or business and it is a fantastic way to help the honey bees. How will you help?

Beauty and the Bees

Honey is great for making skin soft!

Honey is truly one of Mother Nature’s “super foods.” Although honey is mostly commonly thought of as a sweetener for food, there are many uses for honey outside of the kitchen! Honey is gaining popularity in the beauty industry in bubble baths, facial masks, moisturizers and cosmetics. Honey is all-natural, wholesome and has a long history of enhancing beauty--starting as early as Cleopatra. Today, one very popular moisturizing facial mask is made out of honey, coconut oil and aloe! Honey is a humectant, which means that it attracts moisture. It works like lotion and keeps skin soft. Honey is also great for treating acne. That’s because honey is antibacterial which means that no bacteria or germs can grow in it. Honey is

There are over 300 varieties of
honey produced in the United states,
and 3,000 across the world!

also becoming popular in removing hair as well. It’s called sugaring. They take honey and mix it with lemon juice and sugar to make a sticky paste. Then, beauticians stick it to the skin, pull it off quickly and the hair comes right off! It is almost painless as well! Even outside of the beauty salon, honey is a great product to use on skin. Mixing honey and milk together can be a great remedy for a sunburn! Honey can even be used to make your hair shiny! Mixing honey and apple juice together and combing that solution through your hair before a shower will give your hair extra shine without looking greasy.

Did you know it takes 8 pounds of honey
to produce 1 pound of wax? That's a lot of work!

Honey isn’t the only product bees make that people use in the beauty industry. Beeswax is also a very common product. Many types of chapstick and hand lotions are made from beeswax because it helps hold in moisture. Beeswax is produced when a worker bee gorges herself with honey and then tiny cells of wax come out of four pairs of wax glands on the bee’s abdomen. Did you know that it takes about 400,000 wax cells to make one pound of wax? That is a lot of time and honey! Check out http://www.honey.com/images/uploads/general/beautyofhoney.pdf and mix up your very own homemade beauty recipes using honey and other hive products.

Bee Thankful

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, there are many things to be thankful for, including honeybees! Honeybees play a very large role in our daily lives.



Historical beekeeping

In the 1600’s, Pilgrims and Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Did you know that honey bees were originally brought to the United States by Pilgrims? Records indicate the first hive of bees was shipped from England and arrived in Virginia in 1622. These bees would have been very helpful to early settlers because of their pollination services. When bees pollinate, they fertilize plants. These fertilized plants will then produce fruits and vegetables. These foods would have been very important to the Pilgrims. Also, the bees would have produced a wonderful natural sweetener!

                 

Honey bees pollinate much of our food supply

Honey bees are still beneficial to our food supply today. Across the United States, honey bees pollinate over 90 different food crops and about 1/3 of our food – that’s like every third bite! Without bees, many of our favorite Thanksgiving dinner foods would be gone. Do you like cranberry sauce, beans, squash, sweet potatoes, or pumpkin pie? Without bees, we would have hardly any of these foods. Even the butter for your rolls and whipped cream for your pie would be scarce. Thanksgiving dinner would be pretty boring without honey bees!

Planting bee-friendly flowers provide bees with a food source

Because bees are so important, we must do what we can to help them. Planting bee-friendly flowers, buying honey from beekeepers, and telling about the importance of honey bees are great ways to help! This Thanksgiving, let’s be sure to be thankful for the wonderful gift of bees!

Taking Care of a Bee Sting

This is what a stinger of a worker bee looks
like up close!

No one likes to get stung by a bee, not even beekeepers! The truth is that honeybees don’t want to sting us either! Honeybees have a lot of work to get done in a very short amount of time. It will take about two million trips to flowers to produce one pound of honey! Not to mention the worker bees only live for about six weeks. Even though honeybees don’t want to sting, it still happens. So, lets take a look at what happens when a bee stings, and what to do if you get stung.

This is what a sting looks like right after it happens!

Only the queen bee and the worker bees can sting. The queen bee is the only bee in the hive that can sting multiple times. That is because her stinger is shaped like a needle and is completely smooth. That means when she stings, her stinger can't get stuck on anything. It is very unlikely to get stung by a queen bee because the rest of the bees in the hive are very protective of her and she rarely leaves the hive. Worker bees can only sting one time, and then they die. This is because they have a barb or hook on the end of their stinger that gets stuck in whatever the worker is stinging. Once her stinger is stuck, she will pull so hard that she will actually pull the insides of her abdomen out and die. She also leaves behind her venom sack, which continues to pump venom into whatever was stung. So what is the best thing to do if you get stung?

Here is what the correct way to remove
a stinger looks like!

Flick the stinger out with a finger nail or a credit card, don’t pinch at it with a tweezers or your fingers because that will force more venom into the sting. Next, ice the area where you were stung. If you are stung on the arm or leg, try to keep it elevated. Make sure to take off any jewelry from around the area as there might be some swelling that occurs. If the area starts to itch, use an antihistamine cream. Also, avoid scratching the area.

If you feel like you are having trouble breathing, your heart rate speeds up and/or your throat feels tight, find an adult and tell them right away! You could be allergic to bee stings. To be safe, tell an adult every time you get stung! 

Honey, You're Versatile

Honey is an incredible product produced only by honey bees. In her lifetime, a worker bee will fly thousands of miles collecting pollen and nectar from flowers. Bees use the nectar to make honey by adding special enzymes to it and dehydrating it until it is just right. This sweet food is delicious by itself, but did you know that are many uses for honey?

Honey is a great ingredient for any recipe

A wonderful way to use honey is in the kitchen – there are hundreds of recipes that honey can be used in, such as bake goods, desserts, side dishes, main courses, and beverages. Because honey is a pure, natural product, it is a wonderful ingredient to use while cooking. Unlike other ingredients, honey not only sweetens and flavors foods, its special properties also help to keep certain foods such as baked good moist and delicious. How do you like to eat honey? For easy recipes to make with honey, check out the “Recipes” link on our blog!

Honey can help moisturize your skin

                  Another way to use honey is in skin care – honey is frequently used in lotions, soaps, lip balms, and cosmetics. Honey is a humectant, which means it attracts moisture to itself. If you have dry, rough skin, honey can help. For thousands of years, famous people such as Cleopatra and Queen Anne used honey to keep their skin and hair looking fresh and beautiful – how can honey help your skin?

Adding honey to hot tea can
help soothe a sore throat

Finally, honey can be used to heal wounds and for other medicinal purposes. Honey is antibacterial; it can be very helpful in healing cuts, scrapes, and burns. Since it is antibacterial, it keeps the wound clean and its moisture helps the wound to heal well. Honey is also excellent if you have a sore throat or cough. Eating honey or adding it to hot tea can help coat and soothe your throat.

With over 300 varietals of honey in the United States and over 3,000 in the world, there is one for every preference!

Parts of a Honeybee

Did you know that honeybees are insects? This means that they have a three-part body and can fly! They have a head, a thorax and an abdomen. The thorax  is the middle part and the abdomen is the long torpedo shaped end. Just like humans, bees have some very specialized body parts to do their daily work. Let’s take a look at those parts and what they do!

Here are even more parts on a bee!

Head

The head is the control center of the bee. It holds the brain of the bee and is also where the nurse bees produce royal jelly, a substance they secrete that makes a normal worker egg become a queen bee! The royal jelly comes out of glands on the top of the worker bee's head. The head also holds the antenna, eyes, and mouth.

Compound and Simple Eyes

Can you see all the tiny dots on her eye?
Those are all lenses!

Honeybees have two compound eyes. Compound eyes are special because they can see different kinds of light very well, especially UV light from the sun. They also help the bees see colors. They have thousands of tiny lenses to make one big eye. That is pretty amazing! A bee has three simple eyes on her forehead that help her determine how much light there is.

Antenna

A bee uses her antenna to tell how fast she is flying. She also uses them for smelling. Honeybees use smells to tell lots of things, like who to let into the hive and also to communicate with each other.

Bees use these to smell things!!

Mandible (Jaws)

The mandible is a very important part of the bee that allows them to eat food and also is like the honeybee’s hands. The honeybees use them to eat pollen and also to bring pollen to the newly laid eggs. Their jaws are also used to cut and shape the wax in the hive. Did you know that it takes a honeybee about 24 hours after eating lots of honey to start producing wax?

Proboscis

The honeybee's proboscis is a dark orange or brown
color.

The proboscis is a long, straw-like tongue that the bee uses to drink up nectar from flowers. Did you know that honeybees have two stomachs? They have a stomach called their honey stomach that is like a storage bin for the nectar the bees collect. When the bees get back to the hive, they take the nectar from their honey stomach and pass it to one of the other worker bees to find an empty cell to put it in. They also have a stomach for the food they eat that leads to their digestive tract.

Thorax

Forewing/Hindwing

The forewing is a larger wing that bee uses for flying. Did you know a bee makes a buzzing noise because they can flutter their wings 11,000 times per second? That is really fast! The hindwing is a smaller wing connected to the forewing that the bee can use for cooling off the hive through fanning. Fanning is when a bee flutters her wings very fast but doesn’t move anywhere. It’s kind of like running in place for humans.

Honeybee's wings are almost completely see through!

Legs

A honeybee has six legs and uses them mostly for walking. They can also use them for carrying pollen. Did you know that when a bee lands on a flower they cover themselves with pollen, then they brush their legs down their back to push the pollen into their pollen baskets? Bees comb their hair too! Pollen baskets are sticky hairs on the back legs of the bee that act like backpacks so the bees can carry large amounts of pollen at a time.

Abdomen

Stinger

Can you see the hooks on her stinger?

The stinger is a sharp needle-like object used for defense. Only the worker bees and the queen have a stinger. Drone bees don’t have stingers, so they can't protect the hive. The stinger on a worker bee has a hook on it so when she stings, the stinger gets stuck. Then the worker bee will pull so hard her insides actually come out and she will die!

Liquid Gold

A worker bee gathering nectar

For beekeepers, summertime is a very important season – it is time to extract honey from the beehive! Throughout the spring and early summer, honey bees work hard gathering nectar from flowers. They store the nectar in a very special sac called a honey sac. The bee flies back to the hive and gives it to another work bee. The bees pass the nectar from bee to bee, adding special enzymes to it. Finally, the bees put the nectar in their honey comb. Nectar is like very sweet water, but honey is very thick and sticky. To change the consistency of the nectar, the bees fan their wings and blow air over it to pull some of the water out. When it has the right amount of water, the bees cover it with beeswax to seal and protect the honey.

A full frame of honey!

Now it is the beekeeper’s turn to work. Beekeepers go out to their beehives and carefully remove all of the frames with honey on them. They brush the bees back into the hive and take the frames home. When they arrive, they use a very hot knife to cut the beeswax seal off and expose the honey. It is exciting to see the fresh honey glistening on the honey comb! The beekeeper then puts the frames in a large machine called an extractor. The extractor spins around very quickly; in fact, it spins so quickly the honey flings out of the cells of honey comb and drips down the sides of the extractor to the bottom. At the bottom of the extractor is a spigot. When the beekeeper opens the spigot, golden honey comes streaming out! It is so much fun to see (and taste!) the reward of the bees and beekeeper’s work. The beekeeper can then strain and bottle their honey – it is ready to eat!

Honey is very valuable

Bees make honey by themselves; beekeepers just extract the honey. A beekeeper does not have to add anything to the honey. The bees make it perfectly on their own. Honey is very valuable – in her whole lifetime, a worker bee will produce only 1/12 tsp. of honey. That is about one drop! Honey is a very important and delicious food. So next time you enjoy a spoonful of honey, think about all of the work that went into producing it and thank the bees and beekeepers!