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The Miraculous Life of Bees


A Bee's Meal


- Main Dish Is Honey. The Side Dish Is Pollen.
A bee's meal consists of honey and pollen. We can call honey the main dish, of which the major ingredient is energy-providing sugar. Pollen is the side dish, which contains proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Royal jelly is a special meal which only the queen bee and larva candidate for queen bee can be given.


- Matured Tasty Honey.
In fact, the nectar collected from flowers by worker bees is not honey. Nectar does not become honey until it is brought back to the beehive, matured and concentrated by worker bees. First, worker bees store nectar in a honey bladder near their stomach and then return to the beehive. They transfer the nectar orally to other worker bee waiting in the beehive. At this stage, enzymes in the body of the worker bees change sugar in nectar to fruit sugar and glucose. Worker bees which receive nectar bring it to a small room for storage. They then flutter wings to evaporate the water in the nectar. High temperatures of around 34°C also promote maturing and the concentration to honey. Finished honey is sealed by beeswax, and stored as preserved food.

- Pollen Dumplings and Honey Bread.
When worker bees get into a flower to suck honey, pollen sticks to small hairs on their body. After worker bees finish sucking honey, they moisturize their legs by applying nectar. When they fly in the air, they rub pollen on the bodies by their wet brush and roll it little by little, store it in pollen basket on the rear legs, and make pollen dumplings using long hairs as a skewer. In this way, pollen dumplings are brought to the beehive, chewed by worker bees in the beehive, and pushed to the bottom of the honeycomb. When the honeycomb becomes full, honey is applied on the top and stored as preserved food in the form of honey bread.

- Special Meal, Royal Jelly.
Worker bees which are in charge of raising larvae eat a lot of pollen stored in the honeycomb. This pollen is synthesized at the lower pharynx and mandible where the worker bee's salivary glands are, and is then secreted as a milky white substance called "royal jelly." This royal jelly, a kind of mother's milk made by worker bees, contains good balance of proteins, vitamins, and minerals, and is given only to the queen bee and queen-to-be-larva. That is why only queen bees grow so large and are able to lay so many eggs.




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