It's nature's only manufactured food!
. We spent a sun-soaked afternoon with Marina at Red Bee and came away with an in-depth look at the fascinating world of hive life.An apiary colony lives in a series of hives stacked on top of each other. In the cold of winter, the family is small—about 20,000 bees comprised mostly of sterile female workers, a handful of male drones, and a single queen—who huddle together in the cold to keep warm.
As matriarch, the queen doesn't just lay eggs all day. She also rules the hive through pheromones; chemical signals that task her children with keeping the hive in working order and making sure only those marked with her scent enter the hive. The youngest bees clean and repair birth cells and feed royal jelly to their sibling eggs. Slightly older bees attend to and clean their queen, transmitting her orders through the rubbing of antennae. Others act as guards, sniffing out the pheromones of bees that enter the hive to guard against intruders. And others repair drafts in the hive with the sticky propolis that foraging worker bees bring back from neighboring sappy trees.
Location is the strongest environmental factor in a honey's flavor, as flowers that grow near a hive influence how that honey tastes. Set a hive in a field of clover—which grows prominently"from the Ohio River to the West Coast and from Canada to Oklahoma," says Marina—and the bees will collect and produce the United States' most common single-source honey.
This makes bees the world's most effective natural pollinators. As they collect nectar from flower to flower they bring those flowers' pollen with them—it collects in bunches along their hairy legs—helping the plants reproduce.Each foraging bee sucks up nectar with a long, tube-like tongue, and then stores it in a secondary honey-sac stomach. A worker can gather her own weight in nectar—about 70 milligrams—in one trip, which requires visiting up to 1,500 flowers.
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