Honeybees
Did you know honeybees have been making honey for millions of years? Some beekeepers keep honeybees as a hobby, while others farm honey for a living. People use honey for food, medicine and beauty products. To produce 2.2 kilograms of honey a bee must travel the same distance as three orbits around the earth. In Canada,we make about 220 million kilograms of honey each year. That's a lot of sweet gooey honey for you and me!
Did you know honeybees cannot live alone? They live in a colony as a community where they depend on each other. Each bee has a job to do. The queen is the mother of all the bees in the hive. She is waited on, protected and fed by the worker bees. The queen only has one job, and that is to lay eggs that grow into adults. She can lay as many as 2000 eggs in a day! Imagine how many eggs she lays in he three-year life.
Drones are lazy. They don't work in the hive, but they do have a job Their job is to mate with the queen. The queen only mates once in her lifetime, so when the hive gets too full, the drones are forced to leave.
The tiny worker bees are females. They have many jobs like feeding the baby larva, cleaning the cone, making honey, storing pollen, taking care of the queen and guarding the hive. Even then their job is not finished. The last job a worker bee does is to become a field bee that collects pollen, nectar and water to feed the colony. They work so hard, their wings wear out and they usually die in the field.
