By Tony Ricci, Sales AssociateBy Tony Ricci, Sales Associate
If you like to eat, you should love honey bees.
Honey bees are fascinating creatures that play a vital role in the cycle of life. In the process of collecting pollen and nectar, they are pollinating plants. Pollination is the act of transferring pollen grains from the male part of a plant to the female part of a plant. Once the pollen is transferred, the plant can create offspring by making seeds. Those seeds contain the genetic information to produce a new plant. The success of your flowers and vegetables depends on this process.
Honey bees are the maternity doctors of plant life!
Honey Bee at Work
Honey bees are very sophisticated. Even though a honey bee lives for only short six weeks, it has a very specific role in the success of a hive. Wild bees make hives in rock crevices, hollow trees and similar places. Domestic bees live in hives created by a bee keeper.
Honey bees spend their entire lives performing tasks that benefit the survival of their colony. Workers make up at least 85% of the colony and do all of the hard work. Tasks are assigned by age of the bee. For the first three weeks of life, a honey bee lives inside the hive and take care of the queen bee as well as the new baby bees. After the third week, the bee leaves the hive as a forager. A bee can travel up to two miles to collect pollen and nectar to bring it back to a hive. Pollen is used mainly to feed the brood, while the nectar is used to make honey.
Apiarist at Work.
An “apiarist”, otherwise known as a beekeeper, manages and maintains colonies of honey bees. One job of a beekeeper is to keep the hives healthy and productive, so they can yield honey and other related products like beeswax and royal jelly. A beekeeper can also provide pollination services to farmers.
But for most of us, it’s all about the honey! That golden elixir that sweetens our tea, yogurt and baked goods and is so very, very delicious.
Honey!
Next time you see a honey bee in your yard or garden, send your “thanks” for all the hard work it does to provide us with our foods!
Tony Ricci is a Sales Associate at Abbott Properties LLC specializing in residential real estate and licensed in Rhode Island. Tony is also a committed and dedicated apiarist.
