November 9, 2006 - The Honey Bee
The Honey Bee is an insect in the Order Hymenoptera of the Insect world and is known scientifically as Apis mellifera.
There are three members of its colony: the queen, the drone and the worker bee. The queen is just that - the queen bee, the royal ruler, the center of the honey bee world. She is the only one who reproduces - laying eggs, and lives for many years - as long a seven yrs! She does not sting - except when hatched and takes out the existing queen when it becomes time to take the throne. The drones are the male bees and serve only for mating a virgin queen bee. Clearly since the queen lives for so long, they don't have a great amount of detail on their job description, so they hang out at snacking on the honey reserves the rest of the time (...sound familiar...?) The worker bees are female and, well, they are the ones that do all the work. They live for about six weeks and accomplish an incredible amount of work during those 42 days.
An active hive of honey bees will consist in the neighborhood of about 65,000 bees (....I don't plan on counting mine, I'll just take the word of all the books and sites I'm reading.....). Prior to today's modern apiary bee hives, it was common for people to keep bees in a skep. Homes, manors and estates were often built with little cubby holes made into the exterior walls to house their bee skeps.
Here are several web sites with great information about the history of beekeeping as well as about bee skeps - the early hives of beekeeping.
http://members.aol.com/ljludes/BeeSkep.html
http://www.beedata.com/data2/skeps.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_(beekeeping)#Skeps
http://www.bhg.com/bhg/store/product.jhtml?catid=cat3520008&prodid=prod300822
http://www.chicopee.com/theherbarium/cart/html/342.html
http://outdoorplace.org/beekeeping/history1.htm
Honey Bee Blessings,
