All About Bees

The honey bee is a flying insect known for pollinating a variety of plants and producing honey. Native to Europe, they are an unaggressive species that uses its sting only in self defense and to protect the hive.

A colony of bees consists of one queen bee, hundreds of male drones, and tens of thousands of female worker bees! Honey bees have a highly organized society where everyone cooperates to feed and protect the queen bee and developing eggs.

Honey bees are crucial to modern agriculture, pollinating many of the fruits and vegetables we eat, such as, apples, blueberries, broccoli, and almonds. As the honey bee collects nectar, pollen naturally sticks to its fuzzy body, allowing the bee to pollinate plants effortlessly! Without the honey bee it would be near impossible to enjoy these crops in the abundance that we do today.

Evidence shows that human beekeeping (known as apiculture) has been practiced dating back to Ancient Egyptian and Greek civilization. Honey bees travel from plant to plant to collect nectar and bring it back to the hive to convert into honey. In the hive, nectar is mixed with natural bee enzymes and placed into cells to dehydrate into what we know as honey.