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Tribeeal Pursuits

Did you know...

• Bees maintain a temperature of 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit in their central brood nest regardless of whether the outside temperature is 110 or -40 degrees.
  
  
• Honey bees produce beeswax from eight paired glands on the underside of their abdomen.
  
  
• Honey bees must consume about 17-20 pounds of honey to be able to biochemically produce each pound of beeswax.
  
  
• Honey bees can fly up to 14 kilometers from their nest in search of food. Usually, however, they fly one or two miles away from their hive to forage on flowers.
  
  
• Honey bees are entirely herbivorous when they forage for nectar and pollen but can cannibalize their own brood when stressed.
  
  
• Worker honey bees live for about 4 weeks in the spring or summer but up to 6 weeks during the winter.
  
  
• Honey bees are almost the only bees with hairy compound eyes.
  
  
• The queen may lay 600-800 or even 1,500 eggs each day during her 3 or 4 year lifetime. This daily egg production may equal her own weight. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees.
  
  
• A populous colony may contain 40,000 to 60,000 bees during the late spring or early summer.
  
  
• The brain of a worker honey bee is about a cubic millimeter but has the densest neuropile tissue of any animal.
  
  
• Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water.
  
  
• Honey has been used for millenia as a topical dressing for wounds since microbes cannot live in it. It also produces hydrogen peroxide. Honey has even been used to embalm bodies such as that of Alexander the Great.
  
  
• Fermented honey, known as Mead, is the most ancient fermented beverage. The term "honey moon" originated with the Norse practise of consumming large quantities of Mead during the first month of a marriage.
  
  
• Honey bees fly at 15 miles per hour.
  
  
• The queen may mate with up to 17 drones over a 1-2 day period of mating flights.
  
  
• The queen stores the sperm from these matings in her spermatheca, thus she has a lifetime supply and never mates again.
  
  
• A queen bee can control the flow of sperm to fertilize an egg when she is about to lay an egg. Honey bees have an unusual genetic sex determination system known as haplodiploidy. Worker bees are produced from fertilized eggs and have a full (double) set of chromosomes. The males, or drones, develop from unfertilized eggs and are thus haploid with only a single set of chromosomes.

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