The Bee
Honey is a tasty natural food collected from flowers by the bees. Bees are very wonderful insects. Many studies have been made about their-living habits and abodes.
They are very useful to mankind for their sweet honey. Still they are wild in nature and are to be kept always at a careful distance.
They live in their hives built by themselves and are also brought up by men in wooden bee houses.
Some of the bees like the humble bee lead a lonely life but most of the bees live together in companies called swarms. Each swarm live in a separate hive.
In every hive there are three kinds of bees. First is the queen bee which is the mother of the whole swarm. She does nothing but lay eggs. The second are the male bees known as the drones. They are big and lovely to look at but they are very lazy and do nothing but eat the honey gathered by others.
When the queen bee selects one of the drones as her mate, immediately the other male bees lose their hold in the swarm and they are killed by the worker bees.
The third is the worker bee. Most of the bees in every hive are worker bees. They are aptly called worker bees for they do nothing but work till their death.
But the worker bees have many things to do. When a swarm of bees come to a new hive, they have to make the honey combs. The honey combs are made up of little cells having six sides. They are made from wax, Honey is stored up in them.
The wax is produced from their bodies and shaped into cells by their stings. As soon as the honey combs are ready, the workers divide the work of the hive among themselves.
Some of the worker bees go out to gather honey from the flowers. Some of them feed the queen bee, take the eggs laid by the queen bee and place them in the cells for hatching. Some stand guard at the door of the hive and some are sweeping and cleaning the bee hive.
The humming sound on hears from the bee hive is the sound of the busy working bees.
When the eggs hatch, the bees come out. If there is more than one queen bee, there is war among them. The winner rules the hive. The loser goes out with its swarm in search of a fresh hive.
