BEES NORTHWEST
A division of Bugaboo Pest Control, LLC
Vancouver (360) 695-2847 Camas (360) 834-5244 Portland (503) 289-0576
Serving the greater Vancouver Portland area since 1984 Owner/Operator Alan V. Luke alan@getbugs.com
WASHINGTON PEST CONTROL LICENSE 7472 OREGON PEST CONTROL LICENSE 69485 Check our reputation at Angie's List
Interesting things about Honeybees
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 Honeybees
may make 10,000,000 trips to gather enough nectar to make a single pound of
honey. The total distance traveled by all the bees to create this much honey
may equal twice the distance around the world. Their activity for this
single pound of honey means a total distance flown of 55,000 miles and over
2,000,000 flowers visited.
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Honeybee
workers move to different jobs as they grow older:
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The term
"honeymoon" comes from the Middle Ages, when a newly married couple was
provided with enough honey wine to last them for the first month of their
new life together.
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When
searching for food sources a honeybee may travel up to 60 miles in a single
day.
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Only
female bees and wasps can sting. Males do not have the egg-laying
"ovipositor" that is modified as the stinger on female insects.
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Honeybees
have 2 compound eyes and 3 simple eyes, for a total of 5 eyes. The compound
eyes have around 6,900 "facets", giving them excellent eyesight.
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The wings
of honeybees beat over 11,000 cycles per minute, but their average flying
speed is only around 15 miles per hour.
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Wasps feed
on sweet liquids, and some that have been feeding on fermenting juice have
been observed, eventually, to get drunk and pass out.
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Honey Bees are the designated "state insect" in: Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin |
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The State
of Utah has the motto "The Beehive State, however the top producers of honey
are traditionally California, Florida, and South Dakota. China produces more
honey than any other country in the world.
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The
average American eats a little over 1 pound of honey each year.
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Honeybees
do not actually "make" honey, but instead they convert the nectar they
gather from flowers to the thicker honey, by constantly regurgitating it and
allowing it to dehydrate.
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The
honeybee is not native to the United States. It is believed to have been
introduced to this continent by some of the first European settlers. Native
Americans referred to the honeybee as the "White Man's Fly".
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Apitherapy
is the use of honeybee venom and honeybee products to treat people
medicinally. It includes the use of honey, pollen, propolis, royal jelly,
beeswax, and the venom from the bee sting. Two of the most common uses of
bee venom are for treating the debilitating symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis
and Multiple Sclerosis.
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 Many
ants, bees and wasps are equipped with stingers, for offense or defense. All
of them, except for the honeybee, are capable of stinging repeatedly.
However, the honeybee can sting mammals only once, as its barbed stinger
gets stuck in mammal skin and cannot be removed. It tears from the body and
the bee dies shortly afterward. Bees are capable, though, of stinging other
insects more than once, as their barbed stinger is able to pull free from
these animals.
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A queen
bee can lay her weight in eggs each day, laying 1 per minute, all day and
all night, for a total of 1,500 eggs in 24 hours, and 200,000 in a year. One
reason for this is survival, for if the workers have detected a pause in
their Queen's egg laying they will immediately begin the process of creating
a replacement.
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The Queen
Bee receives about 90,000,000 sperm from mating with a male, but she
controls how they are used. Not only will she store about one tenth of them
in a separate "spermatheca", but by creating fertilized or unfertilized eggs
the queen can determine whether the eggs develop to female or male bees. All of the workers in the colony are females, so the vast majority of the eggs are fertilized to become females. However, when males are needed the Queen lays unfertilized eggs.
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A single
female yellowjacket begins a new colony each spring, and if all goes well
she may have over 25,000 of her daughters working in the expanded colony by
the end of the summer.
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Bees and
wasps communicate with chemicals, one of which makes them angry. If a wasp
stings you for getting too close to its colony it may emit "attack" signals
that cause other members of its colony to attack you as well.
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The Africanized Honey Bee (a.k.a. "killer bee") have been known to chase people for over a quarter of a mile once they have gotten excited and aggressive. |