Content of the article:
A unique natural product created by bees is called honey. How do bees make honey, why is honey lime, buckwheat, meadow? How does the beekeeper teach you to choose from a single grass a single plant species and wear only its pollen? How can micron pollen beads get a mass with healing properties? Let's try to reveal the secret of getting honey.
Their common home is the hive
The usual name is family for bees. This is some kind of higher organization. The queen bee is not a mother to anyone. Her activity lies in laying eggs, mating once with many drones in the mating flight. And before that, the bees had fed her from the larvae. Drones, too, the bees feed their entire short life. The life of a bee depends on the condition of the wings. With summer intensive work, they become unusable for a month, and the bee dies, and the autumn bees overwinter and carry the first bribe in the spring.
The working bee begins to work from the moment of birth:
- 3 days to clean the comb, cleaning them after the release;
- 4-6 days feed the larvae with honey and pollen, fly around the hive;
- 7-11 days bees appear in the glands of queen milk, they feed the uterus and larvae of the queen, which develop in several cells of cells;
- 12-17 days wax glands appear, and the bees turn into builders of honeycombs, at the same time guard the hive, take nectar and maintain the microclimate;
- from the 18th day until the end of life during the honey harvest, the bee flies out of the hive for raw materials for honey, bee feed.
The community of bees in a hive obeys the laws of a single organism? To survive, the family requires food, Bees carry pollen from flowering plants, process it into honey, store it in wax cells. Scientists investigated how bees make honey from pollen and nectar.
In its flight, the bee is guided by time, smell, color of the hive. She flies to the flowers at the time of their discovery. If, in the absence of the worker, the hive was repainted, she searches for it by smell, but uncertainly. Therefore, in the apiary beehives are painted in different colors.
Honey Making Technology
Before you start collecting honey, you need to get containers for storing the product. Wax hexagonal cells are always created in the hive or wildboard, a perfect design that allows maximum use of volume. Build their bees. At the same time, the cells are not all the same, they are subdivided:
- queen cells, where the queens are fed;
- transient, larvae grow there;
- drone - rebuilt by working bees and queen bees;
- bee - the place of storage of honey.
Why bees honey, of course. You need to feed the brood and all those who work to extend the life of the family, you need to stock up the product for the winter.
So, the scout bee found a blooming glade and flew to the hive, collecting a team for the honey collection. The working bee is a collector of pollen and nectar. Bees begin to make honey as soon as pollen and nectar fall into a special goiter. There are also enzymes that break down sugar.
At the same time as nectar with shaggy legs, the bee collects pollen, pollinating the plant. Pollen ball hides in a basket on his leg, it will be prepared from it perga. In the food warehouse, perga is stored separately from honey.
In order to fill the goiter, the bee needs to collect a tribute from one and a half thousand flowers. Having loaded 70 mg in the goiter, the bee flies low, overcoming the distance to the hive. If the hive stands in the middle of honey plants, it is not more than 2 km to fly, the contents of the goiter is delivered to the hive. If further - part of the product is absorbed by the bee, to replenish energy. Therefore, apiaries are mobile, move to where there are many flowers. 
Worker bees look after the uterus, feed it and brush it. For some unknown reason, they can strangle the uterus in their arms, taking it in a tight, compressing ball. Sometimes a beekeeper finds a sting in a corpse, the womb was killed by her servants, women workers, children.
If you are interested in how the bees make honey, watch the video:
The bee passes the honey to the hive and flies away for a new bribe. At the same time, the worker from the hive several times takes a drop of the brought product, draws it into the goiter and releases it, it adds invertase from her goiter, continuing to ferment nectar. Next, the product is dried, removing excess moisture. It is laid out in a thin layer on the bottom and walls of the cells and allowed to evaporate moisture. The buzz of bees in front of the hive and inside it is the work of wings, ventilation of the hive. The honey, dried to a moisture content of 21%, is put in the top cell and sealed with a wax cap. From the moment a bribe hits a hive before honey ripens, it takes 10 days.
How much honey a bee collects depends on many factors. In bad weather bees do not fly. If the apiary is far away, the bee can make only one letka and a quarter bribe expensive to spend on itself. A healthy family over the summer collects up to 150 kg of honey, half of them are spent on maintaining family life. How hard the sweet product gets to the workers, say dry figures. One collector bee makes 400 sorties for life, flies about 800 km. For 1 g of honey you need to make 75 sorties. One bee for life can bring 5 g of honey, a spoon. A kilogram of honey is collected by joint efforts of 200 bees. The family can be up to 50,000 individuals. The end result depends on weather conditions, the availability of honey plants and family health.
A female bee has a significantly larger brain than a queen and a drone.
Tricks of beekeepers
On the shelves of up to 20 varieties of honey, even from the resin of resin there is, which is not very clear. Turpentine resin and bee, tying the proboscis, will die. How do bees collect honey only from wormwood when there are herbs around? Since ancient times, insects have been taught to collect only lime or buckwheat honey, feeding this product to worker bees before leaving for work. The fed bees pollinate the desired field ten times more efficiently, selectively collecting the healing product.
