Last Sunday night the ladies of our church met in the heat in our church garden to enjoy fellowship. We had a lady who brought her butterfly presentation and I was invited to share about bees. We enjoyed yummy desserts made from our garden produce also. 

These are some of the facts I shared with the women and girls:

A queen lays up to 1,500 eggs a day for two to three years. She only leaves the hive once on her mating flight or to establish a new colony. The hive contains 30,000 to 50,000 bees.

Workers who are immature females have many jobs through their brief 45 day life span from cleaning cells, tending larvae, stroking the queen, feeding her, and even carrying her poop out of the hive. Later in life they collect nectar to make into honey. They gather pollen which is called bee bread. The workers excrete Royal Jelly from their heads which is fed to a normal egg which turns the larvae into a queen bee.

Drones are males. They can’t sting. They may mate with a queen one time and then die. Drones eat a great deal, although they don’t collect honey. In fall, the workers sting them and remove their dead bodies from the hive. If they didn’t, the drones would eat all the stored honey and leave the hive to starve in winter.

Maybe I’ll tell you more in some future post.

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