Amazing Honey Bees

Did you know honey bees are the only insects that produce a food that is consumed by humans?
A honey bee hive is the busiest and most efficient factory in the world. Honey bees are very social insects. Every member of the hive has a very special job to perform.
The queen is the matriarch, and only one honey bee can be the queen. However the drones or husbands, can number 500 to 1000 per hive. From these honey bees a very large family is formed, 30,000 to 60,000 workers also live and work in the same hive.
Only the queen honey bee is sexually developed and is nurtured on a special diet of royal jelly. The queen is very unique insect; she mates with drones while in flight. Drones have no stingers, and their only job is to mate with the queen. Queens can lay up to 3,000 eggs in a single day.
Sexually undeveloped females are the caretakers of the eggs and the hive. They do the cleaning, feed the larvae, collect nectar, make wax combs, and fan the hive with their wings to keep it cool for the larvae to survive.
The honey bees make much more honey than they could ever use for the colony. About 80 pounds per hive is extra and can by harvested by humans.
The beekeepers remove the wax honeycomb and scrape the wax covering off the chambers to expose the liquid honey. The beekeepers use a honey extractor to spin the honey out into large drums for transport to the honey packers.
Some of the honey is kept by the beekeepers and jarred to be sold at roadside stands or small privately owned grocery stores.
Honey is unlike other sweeteners, honey contains small amounts of many different vitamins, minerals, amino acids and antioxidants.
Did you know bee honey has been used way back in ancient times to soothe sore throats, heal wounds and also treat stomach problems.
Today we also breed special honey bees that are hand fed therapeutic herbs and natural extracts to substitute pollen. These honey bees produce a type of honey with therapeutic properties that are used to support the immune system and also to decrease the side effects of chemotherapy.