God’s Amazing Bees
By Alan Holdich
Although one can look to the star studded sky or the gorgeous landscape of the Earth to get a taste of the creative genius of God one can also look a little closer to home to see His handiwork. The honey bee is only one of the wonders of this world but and studying the life of these insects is fascinating at least.
Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the honey bee is the amazing highly organized structure of the bee colony. A honey bee colony can have as many as 70,000 bees the majority of which are “worker bees”. In a typical bee colony you will find the following bees: Queen bee, drone bees, worker bees, each with it’s own unique purpose. The Queen bee is selected before birth to be a queen, her eggs (larvae) are pre selected by worker bees to become queens and are placed in special cells in the colony and they are fed honey and royal jelly for food.
Drone bees are male bees whose sole purpose is to mate with the queen. Drones have no stingers and don’t do any harvesting, their lives are considered expendable if food supply in the colony is low.
The worker bee in an undeveloped female bee whose purpose is to feed the queen, keep the hive cool through use of their wings, and collect nectar and pollen for the young in the hive. Worker bees will travel thousands of miles in their lifetime to collect nectar and pollen and they build wax cells to create space to raise young bees and to store the honey. To make honey the worker bees deposit the nectar they collect from flowers and place it in cells where it is fanned to reduce the water content; then the cell is sealed to preserve the honey. The different varieties of honey we enjoy are the result of collecting pollen from different flowers.
The teaspoon of honey you enjoy in a cup of tea is the result of one bee traveling trip after trip between the hive and the flower source, well over 150 trips, easily over thousands of miles! Perhaps it’s time to change the old cliché from “work like a dog” to “work like a bee!”
