Being afraid of bees, wasps, yellow jackets, and all sorts of creepy crawly creatures is natural for everyone including myself. And facing my fears and stepping out of the box is not something I typically want to do, so when my father told me one day that he wanted me to become a bee keeper with him, I knew I was going so far out of my comfort zone that I was frightened I would be scarred for life. Two years ago, later June my dad and I scoured the web to find people who were selling their bees at a reasonable price since we were rookies, first timers who hadn’t a single clue of what it was like to own a bunch of stinging bugs. Finally a Mann Lake website that we had found was what my father and I were digging for! I scrolled through anxiously …show more content…
And it was the smell of honey, you could actually smell the gooey, sticky liquid from inside creamy white boxes, which I realized were not as scary after all. As my dad briskly walked over to the man who was in charge to pay him his money owed, I wandered a different direction and surprisingly my feet almost by themselves, as if they had a mind of their own, walked me all the way to the bees that I was to take home with me. I knelt down beside them and saw a small Italian bee crawling on the outside it’s box. The body of the bee was mesmerizing, it had two beautiful, delicate, wings that laid flat at rest on it’s back. Under those clear colored wings I could see black and yellow stripped fur on the bees body covering the whole bug. Some people find it hard to believe, but at that moment I didn’t feel afraid, I didn’t want to run away or trap myself inside our van because doing something as crazy as bee keeping was outside of my comfort zone. No, I faced my fears that day and once my father was done talking to the slim man in charge I threw both of my hands under that 3lb bee box and I hoisted it up into the trunk of our van. At that point forward I was interested in learning about bees and their populations, production, and honey producing. I can gladly say that my dad pushed me out of my comfort zone, but initially I was the one who made myself face what I was afraid of. And as of today I am a proud beekeeper of two years and I have two hives and soon to be more in the near
Honey bees, or Apis mellifera, are social insects, despite what preconceptions there are about them. They are commonly divided into three divisions of class. The first is the worker bees. They are born from fertilized eggs and are the females that are not sexually developed. They are the ones that people usually associate with honey bees. Their main job is to search for food, and build and protect the hive from predators. They have one stinger that, when used, the worker will die. Next is the queen. Her job is to lay the eggs that will hatch into the new generation of bees. Queens also controls the hive and the activities within the hive by producing chemical pheromones the steers the behavior of the bees. She possesses a stinger and can sting and kill multiple times and not be killed herself. (Hoover, S, et al. 2003) In most hives, only one queen is present and if that queen dies, the workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the workers with a special diet called “royal jelly.” This allows the sterile worker to develop into a fertile queen. The last class division i...
Many people know very little about how honey bees have been apart of our history from colonial times. Why were honey bees important to the colonial beekeeper? How were the bees kept? Does beekeeping now, vary from what it was then? These are all questions that must be asked. The honey bee is a unique insect that has been apart of the history of our country for centuries. Beekeeping has changed over time yet many of the essential results of keeping honey bees are unchanged. Lets look at their similarities and differences.
Think for a moment of a world without bees; a world without our buzzing friend. They might look like they barely do much to help our ecosystem. However, bees are a vital part of our agriculture and this makes it vital that we keep them around. The bee population decline in recent years is troubling for both us and our little friends. As their friends, we must do all we can in order to ensure their survival which in turn will ensure our own.
Kidd’s experience with bees also inspired her while writing The Secret Life of Bees. Bees flew from cracks in the walls from Kidd and Lily’s rooms. “…how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room…” (Kidd 1) is what Kidd wrote, in which I think was one of her most vivid flash backs. Also, Kidd’s mother and Rosaleen had to clean up puddles of honey from the bees. Kidd remembered when her husband has noticed puddles of h...
Initially, I didn’t care much about bees until after I received this assignment. Although I may be allergic to bees, they do help my everyday life. I don’t want food prices to go up because we can’t save some bees. We spend trillions on protection, when we have no war. How about take a few million to save the bees, and possibly save man.
Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees. New York, New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
The initial reactions to a swarm of honey bees are fear and distress. Honey bees are frowned upon because of the annoying noise they emit and the pointy stinger on their abdomen. To the mainstream population, honey bees are just pesky insects whose primary goals are to sting random individuals and make honey. Honey bees are not another species of pesky creatures that deserve to be fumigated into extinction; they are insects with fascinating lives. The honey bees that buzz noisily around an office have a much more complicated life than annoying people for petty amusement. The honey bee’s meticulous lifestyle inside of their colonies, their vital need for communication with each other, and their species-dependent form of fertilization makes them
What do you think when you think of bees? I think of honey, pollination, and soon, new life. According to Walt D. Osborne, “Bees are vital for the pollination of more than 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide, including almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and strawberries,” (Osborne 9-11) but each year a large percent of hives have vanished due to many different factors such as stress. Most people would declare that the average honey bee is insufficiently important to the world because bees are pests to home owners everywhere, but bees are extremely important to earths’ survival than any other pollinator in the world; they help pollinate most of the world’s agriculture; yet in the recent years bee populations have plummeted rapidly. I am writing this paper to create awareness that the agricultural society ought to stop or lessen the spraying of pesticides/ insecticides on crops, unnatural diets and overcrowding in the hives.
Miline, Ira Mark. Ed. "The Secret Life of Bees." Novels for Students. Vol. 27. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Print.
While arguments are out there that disagree, recent trend in honey bee die offs has shown
Proposal The first step in bee conservation would be to accurately determine the cause of death of bees in the United Kingdom. This would use about £30million to set up research labs across the country. Stricter guidelines for bee keepers would be developed so that dead bees can be analysed by researchers to better understand the cause of death. Bee keepers need to be vigilant about reporting colony deaths and sending found bee bodies to appropriate researchers to investigate the cause of death.... ...
The honey bees started to vanish rapidly without any reason in the year 2006. Honey bees are vital to the life of humans, plants, and animals. In the article “The Importance of Honey Bees”, Maria Boland writes, “Honey bees pollinate 80% of the earth’s plants, which converts to 1/3 of what humans eat.” The world should look into saving the honey bees because, without them, plants would not be pollinated, animals would die, humans would have a hard time finding things to eat, and the world would lose staggering sums of money. In the book The Backyard Beekeeper, Kim Flottum writes that Albert Einstein once said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. Because the honey bee is important to all life on earth, our government should work to help educate children and adults on the honey bees, regulate pesticides sold, and help fund research towards protecting the honey bees.
The Creature That Opened My Eyes Sympathy, anger, hate, and empathy, these are just a few of the emotions that came over me while getting to know and trying to understand the creature created by victor frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For the first time I became completely enthralled in a novel and learned to appreciate literature not only for the great stories they tell but also for the affect it could have on someones life as cliché as that might sound, if that weren’t enough it also gave me a greater appreciation and understanding of the idiom “never judge a book by its cover.” As a pimply faced, insecure, loner, and at most times self absorbed sophomore in high school I was never one to put anytime or focus when it came time
During honey bee field trip, I had a first chance to go near to beehives and observe honey bee. Cluster of honey bees were everywhere. They are at the entrance of beehive, each comb of the beehive, even outside of the beehive. I was also surprised that each section of the beehives was too complicated. There were plenty of bees, hexagonal combs blocked or filled with larvae or honey, and a queen. When I used beehive tool and pull out beehive combs, cluster of bees crawl on to my hand. I was afraid about getting stung even though I was wearing gloves and bee suit, but fortunately, I was not get stung. As I touch the bees, it can feel its exoskeleton that I thought it will be crunchy if I tried to squish them with my fingers. When I tried to move
Scientists believe that the honey bee evolved “35 million years ago, but older ones are probably still hidden in the rocks of Southeast Asia” (Chadwick et al. 15). Over the years, the honey bee has changed to help better pollinate and even cross-pollinate flowers and food. “Early bees resembled their carnivorous wasp cousins and had short tongues and sleek bodies” ( Wilson-Rich 15). The bees began to change over time. “Bees became better at collecting pollen, evolving hairier bodies, and a greater ability to recognize different flower types” (Chadwick, et al. 16). With this change