Getting down to 'Buzz'ness

In celebration of Summer coming up and my book, Bug Crazy, Here are some interesting facts about bees:

There are three kinds of bees in a hive: Queen, Worker and Drone.

Only the Queen in the hive lays eggs. She communicates with her hive with her own special scent called pheromones. The queen will lay around 1,500 eggs per day.

The worker bees are all female and they do all the work for the hive. Workers perform the following tasks inside the hive as a House Bee: Cleaning, feeding the baby bees, feeding and taking care of the queen, packing pollen and nectar into cells, capping cells, building and repairing honeycombs, fanning to cool the hive and guarding the hive.

Workers perform the following tasks outside the hive as Field Bees: Gathering nectar and pollen from flowers, collecting water and a collecting a sticky substance called propolis.

Bees have two stomachs - one stomach for eating and the other special stomach is for storing nectar collected from flowers or water so that they can carry it back to their hive.

The male bees in the hive are called drones. Their job in the hive is to find a queen to mate with. Male bees fly out and meet in special drone congregation areas where they hope to meet a queen. Male drone bees don't have a stinger.

If a worker bee uses her stinger, she will die.

Bees are classified as insects and they have six legs.

Bees have five eyes - two compound eyes and three tiny ocelli eyes.

Bees go through four stages of development: Egg, Larvae, Pupae and Adult Bee.

The bees use their honeycomb cells to raise their babies in, and to store nectar, honey, pollen and water.

Nectar is a sweet watery substance that the bees gather. After they process the nectar in their stomach they regurgitate it into the honeycomb cells. Then they fan with their wings to remove excess moisture. The final result is honey.

Bees are the only insect in the world that make food for humans.

Honey has natural preservatives and bacteria can't grow in it.

Remember kids (and adults too), it is always good to expand your learning.  Pick a topic you really enjoy and research it till you become a little pro.  It's fun and you can wow people with your new found knowledge!  Bee happy!