10 Things You Didn't Know About Bees

1. BEE FRUITFUL. There are at least 16,000 classified species of bees. Most are solitary insects; only about 5% are social, the most common being the honeybee. As many as 80,000 of them colonize a single hive.
Bees fly on every continent but Antarctica, and since an-cient times they have been used as a source of food. They feed on nectar and pollen

2. ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN. Drones—male honeybees—do no work whatsoever. They live only for mating with the queen. Hey, it’s a gig. But when there is a shortage of food in the hive, the workers kick the drones’ lazy gigolo asses out.
Hatched from unfertilized eggs, drones are the biggest hunks in the hive, f lourishing from late spring to summer. They have big heads, big bodies, no stinger. Because of their size, drones eat three times as well as workers—not unlike our own idle rich. So when cold weather comes or food supplies dwindle, the workers force the drones outside to starve. Workers of the hive, unite!

3. WHAT HAPPENS IN MID-AIR STAYS IN MID-AIR. Drones’ huge eyes (twice as big as the eyes of worker bees) make it easier to track Her Majesty during the mating flight. When they con-nect, it’s very clumsy, even by human mating standards. Pic-ture an Airborne Warning and Control System refueling in mid-air.
Drones don’t usually mate with a virgin queen from their own hive. Entomologists are unsure how mating areas are selected, but the virgin queen tends to mate some distance from her home hive, and she will be inseminated by several drones during the mating flight.
Caution: men may find the next sentence disturbing. Mating invariably kills the drone, since his entire phallic area is torn from his body to remain inside the queen. Talk about rough sex.

4. THAT HUSSY. The queen continues to mate until she col-lects more than 70 million sperm from multiple males—all suddenly dying or dead. Apparently drones are slow learners, or they don’t share information very well.

5. OOPS. The queen was known as the king until the late 1660s, when Dutch scientist Jan Swammerdam dissected the hive’s biggest bee and discovered ovaries.

6. WE DON’T ALL LOOK ALIKE TO THEM. Australian research-ers have discovered that honeybees can distinguish human faces. The insects were shown black-and-white photos and given treats whenever they recognized their subject.
As reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology on De-cember 15, 2005, honeybees were shown standard pictures used in human recognition tests. Testers put drops of sugar water on one and bitter liquid on the others. The bees soon learned to land on the “sweet” face. Interestingly, they also retained memory of that face, flying directly there with great accuracy (80%) for days after their initial experience. They even recognized faces that were quite similar, regardless of where the pictures were located. But, like humans, they per-formed less well when photos were upside down.

7. AIR SUPPORT FOR SNIFFER DOGS. Homeland Security, take heart. In the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project, Los Ala-mos scientists have trained bees to recognize explosives.
R&D scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are training bees to sniff out explosives like those carried by potential terrorists. The bees are conditioned to stick out their proboscis—the long snout used to suck up nectar—whenever they smell explosives. As in most animal training programs, the research is reward-based. Bees get sweet treats whenever they identify even microscopic traces of dynamite, C-4, or other explosives like those used for im-provised explosive devices (IEDs).
The detective bees would presumably be delivered to checkpoints in small hand-held detectors, and deployed by trained handlers as needed.

8. ANOTHER CUPPA MEAD, M’DEAR? The term “honeymoon” supposedly comes from a northern European custom in which newlyweds would—for a month (“moon”)—drink a daily or perhaps nightly cup of mead, the hearty intoxicant made from fermented honey. But there’s another less cutesy version.
According to the website hudsonvalleyweddings.com, the tradition of a post-wedding “honeymoon” is very different from today’s sweetness-and-light interpretation.
They point to origins in the Old Norse word Hjunotts-manathr—abduction of a bride from another tribe. The wife-swiper then played Hide the Bride, friends helping keep the connubial location secret, lest horned brothers track and whack the horny abductor. Some of this was clearly a game; after the bride’s kinfolk “abandoned the search” (probably a “moon” later), the couple returned openly to the groom’s vil-lage.
The tradition of kidnapping a girl and plying her with honeyed wine (to lessen the burden of sudden wifehood?) dates back to Attila the Hun in the fifth century. (Attila died of a nosebleed while seriously drunk—probably not on hon-eyed wine—during his wedding night.)

9. GREAT MOMENTS IN INSECT SLANG. The term “bee’s knees” was coined by American cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who was also responsible for “the cat’s pajamas,” “the f lea’s eyebrows,” “the canary’s tusks,” and “Yes, we have no ba-nanas.”
Every age hath its expressions, and the 1920s were no ex-ception. “Bee’s knees,” suggesting the dernier cri or something really cool and groovy, started around 1924. Some suggest that it may be a comical mispronunciation of “business.”

10. LICK THAT WOUND FOR YOU, SOLDIER? In ancient times, and as recently as World War I, honey was used to treat battlefield wounds because it attracts and absorbs moisture, making it a valuable healing agent.
Ancient medical records show that Egyptian doctors used honey as an active ingredient in many medicines. Greeks and Romans also spread honey on open wounds to quicken heal-ing. An organic substance with no caustic properties, honey contains vitamin and mineral elements that fight bacterial infection. Bacteria don’t seem to develop resistance to honey as they do to modern-day antibiotics! This may be due to a natural antibiotic agent produced in the bee’s system, which prevents honey from growing mold spores.
Plastic surgeons are known to use honey to speed the re-pair of post-operative scar tissue and to treat varicose ulcers.