A little about bees

Levi Eskola
2/3/11
The Honey bee is a small insect about the size of a marble. They live together in what we
call a colony, with other bees. A colony has one queen; she is the one that lays all the eggs in
the colony. There are also drones that live in the hive. They are the only male honey bees in the
hive and their only job is to mate with a queen, but they don’t mate with their own queen, they
mate with new queens. The worker bees which are the third type of honey bee in the hive, and they
do all the labor while the queen lays eggs and the drones lay around. The workers go collect the
nectar from plants and turn it into honey. Although the younger bees in the hive can’t fly
until their wings mature, they do all the house work, while the older bees go collect and
pollinate the plants. Some plants can’t produce fruit or vegetables until they are pollinated.

Currently the Honey bees can be wild but lately the bee population dropped to less
than 70% of former numbers because of a problem with a parasite called a Honey bee mite,
which really killed most of the wild Honey bees that used to be around. Today there is a big
movement toward rebuilding the bee population all over the world. In one hive there can be
over eighty thousand bees, but when we first put them in the hive there is about ten thousand
bees.
A strong colony of eighty thousand bees can produce about forty pounds of honey in a
week. The hive which they live in is called a brood box which is bigger than the supers or upper
boxes so the queen can lay more eggs in it. The supers are designed for the worker bees to put
Honey so the beekeepers can extract the honey later. Raising bees is sometimes hard work. But we as
people need to be good stewards of Gods property and help the bees survive.

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