Celebrate Bees!


Winter is a special time for celebrating – why not celebrate bees, too? Here are a few ways you can enjoy honey bees and the good gifts they give us this season:

Beeswax makes beautiful candles!



1) Burn beeswax candles in your home to enjoy their sweet smell and pretty glow. Beeswax is highly prized for candle-making because it burns smokeless and dripless, and has a lovely fragrance. Beeswax candles make great gifts, by the way! 

2) ‘Tis the season for coughs and runny noses, too. Try a spoonful of honey to soothe and coat a sore throat or relieve a cough. Honey is an incredible medicine! If you end up with a minor cut, burn, or scrape this holiday season, use honey under your bandage to aid in healing – honey is antibacterial!

3) Looking for a honey bee-friendly gift? You can help the honey bees and brighten someone’s day at the same time:
      - A jar of honey makes a very sweet gift (find unique honey varietals here)
      - Honey isn’t just for eating – it’s a sweet treat for skin, too!  A family
        member, friend, or teacher would love a bottle of Lemon Drop Body Wash
        or jar of Lemon Drop Body Scrub to exfoliate and moisturize skin. Learn
        how to whip up these fun, easy recipes by watching the short videos!
      - Give the gift of bees – you and your family, school, or club could help a
        needy family by giving them a beehive!
      - Encourage someone to cook with honey – make up a jar of easy Honey Spice Oatmeal Cookie Mix!



Honey bees love asters and many other kinds of flowers -
which flowers will you plant for the honey bees next spring?

 4) Read a good bee book! Here are a few ideas:

- Beeing by Rosanne Daryl Thomas

- Beekeeping for Dummies by Howland Blackiston 

- Bees in America by Tammy Horn

5) Honey is yummy in all kinds of holiday dishes – how about Honey Hot Chocolate, Honey Turkey Rollers, or Peppermint Candy Crisps? Find these tasty recipes on the “Cooking with Honey” tab!



6) Too cold to go outside? Beeswax is lots of fun for crafting – make a beeswax origami boat that really floats!



Thank you, honey bees, for bringing us
almost 1/3 of our food!

7) Thinking of spring already? Plan a honey bee garden! Check out these lists (1, 2, and 3) of plants honey bees love and start gathering seeds.

 8) Above all, remember the importance of honey bee pollination: at Christmas dinner or another holiday feast, fill your plate, then scrape 1/3 of the food back off (even the tasty stuff). That’s just about what you’d have left if honey bees disappeared! Now “bee” thankful for the bees and replace the food onto your plate.   

Bee Thankful!

With Thanksgiving only a few weeks away, this is the time of year that we all think about what we are thankful for. We have so many things to be thankful for, but don’t forget to be thankful for honeybees, too!

“Bee” thankful to the honey bees for:

1.       The amazing food that we all enjoy on Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce and many other foods that we enjoy need honey bees for pollination. So thank the honeybees for that extra slice of pie!

2.       Beeswax candles
Many people use special candles on Thanksgiving! Use beeswax candles to add a special glow to your room and a sweet honey sent.

3.       Clothes
Honeybees not only pollinate our food, but they also pollinate cotton! Which we use to make jeans, t-shirts, and socks.

4.       Honey
Last, and certainly not least, is the sweet treat that bees make, honey. I like dipping my ham in honey on Thanksgiving. Ask if you can get some honey to use on your ham or turkey, or maybe you want to try adding some honey to your pumpkin pie!

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…It’s Super Bee!



Static electricity:
the balloon sticks to your hair...

 You've learned about some of the amazing things that honey bees do, but did you ever wonder exactly how they do it? Honey bees have super special bodies that help them do these incredible jobs. Let's take a closer look at the fascinating anatomy of a honey bee:

- Hair



...and the pollen sticks to the bee's hair!



That's right - hair! A honey bee's fuzz is more than just good looking, because it actually serves a very important purpose. To illustrate, we'll do a simple experiment.

Step 1: Blow a balloon and tie to close it.

Step 2: Quickly rub the balloon back and forth a few times
against your head (make sure your hair is clean and dry).

Step 3: Slowly move the balloon away from your head and watch what happens.

Your hair sticks to the balloon because you've created static electricity between your hair and the balloon. When the honey bee flies through the air, the action of the breeze blowing through her hair causes static electricity to develop. When she lands on a flower, the static electricity makes the pollen stick to her hair, just like the balloon stuck to yours!



See the antennae in front?

 - Antennae

Every honey bee has one pair of antennae (pronounced "an-ten-uh") on her head, which she can move using tiny muscles. The antennae are the noses of the bee, although she also uses them to touch, taste, and even hear. The bee even uses her antennae to measure flight speed – kind of like the speedometer in your car, which tells how fast you're driving!



A pollen-dusted worker bee with lots of pollen in her baskets

 - Pollen baskets

Like all insects, honey bees have six legs in three pairs. The third pair of legs on a honey bee, however, are very special. Built in to a worker bee’s third pair of legs is a concave area (meaning that it caves in, like a bowl) with a fringe of tiny hairs around the edge, making a sort of basket on each leg. When the pollen sticks to the bee’s hairs, she uses comb-like structures on her second pair of legs to comb the pollen out of her hair, and then packs the pollen into her pollen baskets. The stiff hairs lining the rim of the baskets help the pollen grains to stay in place. Once her baskets are full, the worker bee will fly back to the hive, and other worker bees will use the pollen to feed the brood (baby bees) for protein. You can eat pollen, too! It’s wonderful in cereal, smoothies, peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches, or even on ice cream! Find it at your farmers’ market or health foods store.



This bee is cleaning her proboscis. You can also see her antennae
in this picture.

 - Proboscis

“Proboscis” (pronounced “pro-boss-kiss”) is the name for a honey bee’s tongue, which she uses like a short straw to suck nectar, honey, and water, feed other adult bees, and taste.  It’s a complex tongue made of several different parts which each serve a unique purpose.

Hair, antennae, pollen baskets, and a proboscis are just a few of the extraordinary features of a honey bee’s anatomy which she uses to do some truly amazing and very important things that benefit you and me, too.

Honey Bees: Winter Preparation

A honey bee pollinating
pumpkin.

     With summer coming to an end, in most of the country we are starting to prepare for winter. But we are not the only ones; honey bees are also preparing for winter. In some parts of the United States, the fall honey flow is starting. A honey flow is when many plants are blooming, so there is a lot of nectar for honey bees to gather and use to make honey. There can be several honey flows each year. In Hawaii honey bees make honey all year! In the northern parts of the U.S. flowers may only be blooming from May to September!

     The honey flows are important for beekeepers because honey bees are gathering nectar after we harvest much of the honey in early fall. But everyone benefits from the honeybees’ fall foraging, as they gather pollen and pollinate many of our foods, like blackberries, raspberries, and pumpkins!

Bee hives in Washington State.

     But the honey flow is the most important to honey bees. Over the winter they eat the honey they made during the honey flows. During the winter, the honey bees cluster, the group together and form a ball, which is how they stay warm. To keep their cluster’s temperature warm, they vibrate their wings. Of course, the honey bees need energy to do this so they eat honey! In some parts of the United States, like Alaska and Maine, honey bees will spend several months clustered, but in states like Georgia and Florida, the honey bees might only form a cluster in the coldest times.

Honey Bees & Ice Cream - A Sweet Connection



A honey bee hard at work on an alfalfa blossom

Summer is here, and with it some of our favorite treats: yummy summer fruits, barbecue, corn on the cob, lemonade, ice cream...and speaking of ice cream - did you know that honey bees help to bring us this delightful dessert? Let's take a closer look at just how that happens. 

It all begins under the sunshine, in blooming fields of alfalfa. Alfalfa is a pretty, purple-flowered plant grown in many states across the nation. The alfalfa flowers must be pollinated in order to produce alfalfa seeds to plant the next year's crop. And guess who does a great part of this alfalfa pollination? The honey bees, of course!
 

Alfalfa being harvested by a swather so that it can be
made into hay

The alfalfa plants are cut several times each year using a machine called a swather. Next, the alfalfa is dried and often bundled into bales. Now it's ready to be fed to hungry cows!
The dairy cows eat the alfalfa and produce milk, which we use to make a variety of delicious foods: cream, butter, yogurt, cheese...and ice cream!



A cow enjoying alfalfa hay

 Ice cream can also contain a number of other tasty ingredients that the bees bring us through pollination, including strawberries, peaches, almonds, coconut, peppermint, and cherries. Can you imagine ice cream without honey bees? Dessert wouldn't be quite so exciting, would it?

When the Haagen-Dazs ice cream company realized how important honey bees were to their ice cream, they made a wonderful website designed to tell others about the vital role honey bees play as pollinators. Take a look here to learn more!

You can also check out our "Recipes" tab to find new recipes for Homemade Honey Ice Cream, Honey Fudgesicles, and scrumptious ice cream toppings made with honey! 

A Sweet Difference

     Did you know that there are different types of honey? The type of honey is determined by what plant the honeybees gathered the nectar from. This is because the nectar varies from one plant to another, which gives us many types of honey. In fact there are over 300 types of honey in the United States and about 3,000 worldwide!!!



Liquid, comb, and creamed honey!



      Honey ranges in color from water white to black, and the darker the color the more robust the flavor. Buckwheat honey, which is a very dark honey and has a strong flavor, is used by many people to sweeten their tea or coffee; whereas clover honey, which has a milder flavor, is used by many people for baking. 

      Honey not only ranges in color but it also comes in more than one form. Extracted honey or liquid honey is what you would find in the grocery store. Comb honey, which is honey still inside the beeswax, is great when chewed like gum. Creamed honey has been crystallized in a controlled process, leading to a smooth and creamy honey that is great spread on biscuits and toast.

            Different areas of the United States have different types of honey. To find unique, local honeys in your area, visit www.honeylocator.com

Honey Bee, Honey Bee, What Do You See? Part 2



Cherry blossom, cherry blossom,
cherry blossom...

Now that we've learned about honey bee vision, let's see how they use their special abilities to pollinate, and how you can help them do that!

Because of her excellent vision, the foraging worker bee knows exactly how to find her way back home - even if she's miles away! Honey bees navigate by the position of the sun, which their vision can detect on even an overcast day with just a tiny patch of blue sky showing.



Yum - thank you, bees!

Honey bees also use their 5 eyes to detect the flowers they visit. As the honey bee gathers pollen and nectar from the flowers, she will fly to only one kind of flower on each trip from the hive. For example, she will fly from a cherry blossom to a cherry blossom and then to another cherry blossom. That's a good thing, too, because if she flew from the cherry blossom to an apple blossom, these flowers would not be pollinated and able to bear fruit! This flower loyalty is one of the reasons why honey bees are such outstanding pollinators.


One plant is nice...



One of the best ways you can help the honey bees in your area this spring is to plant flowers for them.

Here are some things to keep in mind when you're

planning your garden:

- Choose flowers that come in some of the honey bees' favorite colors: white, yellow, blue, and purple.
- Remember that honey bees have a fantastic sense of smell, so consider plants with sweet-smelling flowers or herbs with scented leaves. 

...but many plants are even better!


- Because honey bees will visit only type of flower on each trip from the hive, you can help them out by growing several plants of the same kind in one place.

Have fun watching for these remarkable forager bees this spring!