A Warm Welcome To You

Welcome To BEE

(Blog for E-Learning Education) 

What is the first thought that comes to mind when one hears about a bee? You may think of their harmful traits and looks. Or maybe feel uncomfortable every time one goes buzzing by your ear. The urge to kill it may be apparent. However one thing that the majority of people do not know about bees is that they are a crucial part of our ecosystem. Honeybees play a crucial role in manufacturing goods such as fruits and honey, which help control our daily diet, but due to some circumstances, the bee population has started to decrease and may eventually become extinct.

This website will show the importance of bees across the globe and the causes of their extinction. It will also show the results of what may happen to our ecosystem without them and give solutions to help save them. If the bee population becomes extinct, this will surely be highly dangerous to not only mankind, but to all of nature. Honeybees are tremendously important to a country’s economic and agricultural stability. Our target audience for this website are politicians who have the power to vitally help to keep the bees alive. We hope you enjoy our website and hope that this information will motivate politicians and others to help keep the honeybee population growing by providing methods to keep them alive.

Bees Cartoon

Brief Information About Bees

There are about 20,000 different species of bees in the world. Bees live in colonies and there are three types of bees in each colony. There is the queen bee, the worker bee and the drone. The worker bee and the queen bee are both female, but only the queen bee can reproduce. All drones are male. Worker bees clean the hive, collecting pollen and nectar to feed the colony and they take care of the offspring. The drone’s only job is to mate with the queen. The queen’s only job is to lay eggs.

Bees store their venom in a sac attached to their stinger and only female bees sting. That is because the stinger, called an ovipositor, is part of the female bee’s reproductive design. A queen bee uses her ovipositor to lay eggs as well as sting. Sterile females, also called worker bees, don’t lay eggs. They just use their ovipositors to sting.

Bees see all colors except the color red. That and their sense of smell help them find the flowers they need to collect pollen. Not only is pollen a food source for bees, but some of the pollen is dropped in flight, resulting in cross pollination. The relationship between the plant and the insect is called symbiosis.

Certain species of bees die after stinging because their stingers, which are attached to their abdomen, have little barbs or hooks on them. When this type of bee tries to fly away after stinging something, part of the abdomen is ripped away.

Useful Insects: Where would we be without bees, aka "the world's most useful insect"? For such tiny creatures, measuring only 1/8" to 1 inch in length, bees do the heavy lifting of providing honey, wax and pollinating most of the world's plants. Females carry their honey load in a "basket" located on their hind legs.

Complex Communities: Honey and bumble bees live in complex communities consisting of a queen, males and sterile females. While the honey bee constructs a home of individual wax cells to raise their young, the bumble bee uses grass and wax to create a home.

A Furry Body: A body covered by fur enables bees to continue their daily rounds of pollination on cooler days.

DID YOU KNOW?

Hard Work for Honey: Worker bees from a single hive will travel about 55,000 miles and hit 2 million flowers to produce one pound of honey.

Brainy Bees: A honey bee's brain, though only about a cubic millimeter, has the most densely packed gray matter of any animal.

Bee Antiseptic? :Microbes can't live in honey. In fact, in ancient times, bee honey was frequently use as a topical dressing for wounds.