All About HONEY BEE

Honey is a sweet, viscous food substance made by honey bees and some related insects. Bees produce honey from the sugary secretions of plants (floral nectar) or from secretions of other insects (such as honeydew), by regurgitation, enzymatic activity, and water evaporation. Bees store honey in wax structures called honeycombs. The variety of honey produced by honey bees (the genus Apis) is the best-known, due to its worldwide commercial production and human consumption. Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from hives of domesticated bees, a practice known as beekeeping or apiculture.

Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, and has about the same relative sweetness as sucrose (table sugar). Fifteen milliliters (1 US tablespoon) of honey provides around 190 kilojoules (46 kilocalories) of food energy. It has attractive chemical properties for baking and a distinctive flavor when used as a sweetener. Most microorganisms do not grow in honey, so sealed honey does not spoil, even after thousands of years.

Apiculture means Beekeeping

Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from hives of domesticated bees, a practice known as beekeeping or apiculture.

Humans foraging for honey at least 8,000 years ago.

A honey bee is a eusocial flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade, all native to Eurasia.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey

A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus Apis of the bee clade, all native to Eurasia. They are known for their construction of perennial colonial nests from wax, the large size of their colonies, and the surplus production and storage of honey, distinguishing their hives as a prized foraging target of many animals, including honey badgers, bears and human hunter-gatherers. Only eight surviving species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 43 subspecies, though historically 7 to 11 species are recognized. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees.

The best-known honey bee is the western honey bee (Apis mellifera), which has been domesticated for honey production and crop pollination; the only other domesticated bee is the eastern honey bee (Apis cerana), which occurs in South Asia. Some other types of related bees produce and store honey, and have been kept by humans for that purpose, including the stingless bees, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. Modern humans also value wax for use in making candles, soap, lip balms, and various cosmetics.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee

Bee Anatomy

Honey bees are insects and have five characteristics that are common to most insects.

• They have a hard outer shell called an exoskeleton.
• They have three main body parts: head, thorax, abdomen.
• They have a pair of antennae that are attached to their head.
• They have three pairs of legs used for walking.
• They have two pairs of wings.
• Source: https://askabiologist.asu.edu/honey-bee-anatomy
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