Science & Nature

Comb honey is as close as you can get to raw honey. It is still in the original packaging that the bees produced, with little hexagonal wax cells containing pure, unadulterated honey, totally...

Flowers offer birds, insects and animals nectar and pollen as a nutrition source in return for help in pollination. Since flowers are rooted and can't move about, they benefit from their mobile...

The carpenter bee acquired its name from the fact that it will chew wood and excavate holes in it to create nesting areas. While the carpenter bee looks a bit like the bumble bee, it has some...

We all know bees eat honey. But honey provides only the carbohydrate portion of a bee's diet. The protein portion comes from the pollen produced by various plants. Pollen is essential for drone...

Despite their stinging defenses, bees are a common food item among certain birds.

Carpenter bees do not live in hives, but rather they are solitary insects. The female bores holes into rough, unfinished wood to lay her eggs. Holes can be as shallow as six inches and as deep as...

The honeybee and carpenter bee differ in appearance. They also differ in behavior, particularly in dealing with their young. As a result, carpenter bees produce less honey than honeybees.

The carpenter bee and bumblebee are hard to tell apart. That is because there are varieties of carpenter bees with yellow and black hairy bodies, similar to bumblebees. However, the two have some...

Many homeowners face what can seem like an assault by large bees during the spring and summer months. These are likely to be carpenter bees, a species of bee that lives in wood surfaces, from the...

Bees gather pollen from flowers and use it to make honey. It enables them to survive cold winters and create future generations of queens, workers and soldiers. Pollen is vital for bee survival,...

The smoker is an important tool in beekeeping equipment, used by the beekeeper to blow smoke into the beehive before entering the hive. This quiets the bees and protects the beekeeper from getting...

Because both can give a painful sting, bees and wasps are often confused for each other. While they may look similar and are related, they are two distinctly different types of insect. Each has...

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are more than 20,000 species of bees throughout the world. Though characteristics of the body parts of a bee vary from species to species, there are...

Beekeeping can serve as a hobby or a full-time job for those who have the desire, tools and knowledge on how to properly care for a hive of bees. Domesticated bees perform all the same duties as...

In this article I will share with you a little of my knowledge of beekeeping. Installing a package of bees is not difficult but if not done properly can result in catastrophe for your bees, not...

Honeybees play an important role in nature and agriculture. Without bees to pollinate the plants, gardeners and farmers would not have a harvest each year. You can become a backyard beekeeper with...

Bees need feeding in the early spring when they are rearing brood and the flowers are not blooming and in the late summer/early fall when they need to build up their stores for winter. Ideally,...

If you are going to be a beekeeper instead of someone who keeps bees, then you have to take care of the hive. To do so, you have to learn what is going on inside of your hive. This requires...

The most important factors in beekeeping are knowledge and the right equipment. In this article we will discuss the basic equipment needed to host a colony of bees, keep yourself safe and extract...

For most of human history, honeybees have played a part in our mythology. Honey has long been valued and prized as a rare sweet, and the bees themselves were once elevated to legendary status....

Honey bees are important insects. Aside from providing us with honey, they also perform the valuable service of pollinating many different types of plants. The domesticated honey bee goes through...

Queen bees really are treated like royalty. Queens rarely leave the hive, are waited on by worker bees for their entire life and get to enjoy a special food called "royal jelly."

Bees produce honey, which is used worldwide for food and health needs. In addition, bees assist in keeping the environment healthy by pollinating flowers. However, neither would be possible...

Honeybee is the name for several species of socially oriented bees distinguished by their honey making and hoarding. Honeybees have long been domesticated, and they are also naturalized on every...

Killer bees, also known as Africanized honey bees, are the direct descendants of a cross between African bees and Brazilian bees. Killer bees are extremely aggressive and attack in large numbers...

Bees are beneficial insects that have no competition in the natural world since they are the only insects capable of collecting nectar and producing honey. Agriculture has benefited from...

Beekeeping is an ancient way of obtaining honey without having to go out and look for it. The ancient world perfected methods of keeping bees in a variety of containers, spreading the practice...

If you've decided to plant a garden, attracting bees may be part of your plan. Because bees help gardens thrive with pollination, they may become an intricate part of your flowerbed. To attract...

The term "killer bee" evokes an image of a rogue bee intent on taking out anyone or any animal in its path in a cold, premeditated way. Hollywood has helped to spread this image with movies like...

Bee pollen is pollen from plants, particularly flowering plants, that is transported by bees back to their hive.

For more than 10,000 years, man has harvested honey from bees. Harvesting methods were simple: find a nest of bees in a hollow, rotting tree; use fire to smoke out the bees; and scoop out the...

Keeping bees at the end of a garden is a wonderful hobby. The benefits far outweigh the occasional sting, and bee keepers say no one can earn that title unless they have been stung a few times. ...

You read right. It's a bee census! It's called the Great Sunflower Project,and it's a lot of fun. Bee populations all over the world are in decline. These amazing insects are not only...

There are some bugs that can actually help us predict the weather without having to listen to a weatherman. Obviously this won’t give you’re the 5 day forecast, but it is quite interesting and...

Raising queen bees can be a lucrative and rewarding experience. However, it can also be a confusing process, leaving many potential bee raisers lost. Although the initial time investment is great,...

The bumblebee life cycle begins in the spring when a hibernating queen bee emerges from the leaf litter that has kept her warm since the previous autumn and looks for a site to build her nest....

Enjoy the sweet taste of natures bounty. By doing this yourself you will learn alot about the honey bee.From a nature aspect you can see the remarkable things a honey bee can do and why they are...

Most species of bees live in colonies, where every member works for the benefit of all. The queen bee is the most important member of a bee colony. Without her, the bee colony collapses. If every...

Every bee colony needs a queen bee. Out of all of the thousands of bees that inhabit a typical colony, only the queen can reproduce. Consequently, her death is a major event. To ensure the...

Although the existing queen bee lays all of the eggs, it is the workers who decide when it is time to raise a replacement queen. They may decide to raise new queens because the hive has become...

Bee pollen supplements are made from pollen collected by worker bees from various flowers, collected when they return to the hive and packaged for use as supplements by people seeking all kinds of...

The Africanized Honey Bee, also known as the killer bee, was actually the result of an experiment gone bad in 1957. The entire life cycle of killer bees is only a little over two months.

A beekeeper's job involves maintaining groups of social honeybees for the purpose of harvesting their honey. Different types of honeybees are used depending on where the beekeeping is taking...

The Great Sunflower Project is a Citizen Science project that involves planting sunflowers. But the larger goal is much bigger, to learn and understand more about how bees feed themselves, and...

If you've ever used a natural candle or handled a piece of honeycomb, chances are you're familiar with the basics of beeswax. However, the natural history of this fascinating and useful...

A young, healthy queen bee is essential to establishing or maintaining a productive hive. If you are starting a hive or your old queen bee has died or left with a swarm, you will need to purchase...

Since they have slowly moved into the United States, the killer bee has a reputation that exceeds its deeds. Killer bees were released in North America by accident and their arrival has caused...

Bees can be a major problem when they move into your walls or build a colony near your home. Once a bee colony is established, it can be extremely difficult and expensive to remove it. For this...

Records of beekeeping date as far back as ancient Rome and Egypt, establishing it as one of the earliest forms of agricultural food production. Although the United States' bee population dropped...

Feeding your bees using a baggie as a feeder