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Few insects have been so richly endowed by the Creator as the honeybee. Honeybees are the only insects that provide an important food for man. Moreover, they are useful in helping more than 100,000 kinds of plants to exist and multiply, since the honeybees carry pollen from one flower to another, enabling them to form seeds and reproduce themselves.
Honeybees are social creatures. They live and work together in large groups. They are skillful builders and good housekeepers. They are a model of diligence, and waste no time. “Busy as a bee”—is a well known saying.
Apart from the three major sections of its body, the head, the chest part (or thorax), and the belly (or abdomen), a honeybee has many less-visible "working tools." A special kind of stomach, called a honey sac, is used to store the nectar it extracts from flowers. The bee’s legs are provided with bristles or hairs, known as combs. These are used by the bee for scraping pollen from its antennae and legs and packing it into the pollen baskets—these are openings in its hind legs. Bees build cells in their hives with wax produced by their own bodies. Special wax glands secrete liquid wax onto wax plates located on the underside of the abdomen where it hardens.
A very important part of the bee’s body is its stinger. It is located at the rear of the bee’s abdomen. It is one third as long as its entire body. The sting is the weapon of the worker bee used to protect its honey and hive. [Click here for more about the honeybee's lifecycle]
Every bee colony has three classes, or castes, of honeybees: A queen, drones (males), and workers (infertile females).
The queen has a leisurely life; she spends her day laying eggs – about 1500 eggs a day. The queen lacks the working tools of the worker bees and her abdomen is significantly longer. Her sting is different too. The sting of the worker has barbs at the end, so when a worker bee stings, it cannot free itself without tearing away part of its abdomen, and therefore dies. But a queen has a smooth needle-sharp sting that she can use again and again without threatening her life. The life of a queen may last from three to five years.
The worker honeybees are females, but usually lay no eggs. They do all the hard work, and never stop working until they die. After fully devolping, the worker’s first duty in life is to feed the grubs and pupae (see later for definition) which are still developing in their specially built wax cells. Young worker bees also guard the entrance of the hive. Some workers stand within the hive near the entrance and move their wings rapidly. In this way they create air currents to keep the air in the hive fresh and at the right temperature of 33.9° C (93° F). These air currents also remove moisture from the hive and help the nectar turn into honey.
After two or three weeks at home, the young workers begin to gather nectar and pollen. The season of honey-making is in the spring and summer, when flowers are in bloom. That is when each worker honeybee is truly “busy as a bee.” Worker-bees born while pollen and nectar are plentiful work themselves to death within a month (a bee dies after flying about 500 miles because its wings become worn out). Those born in the fall may live through the winter and reach an age of eight or nine months.
The male bees or drones do not work in the hive. They have neither wax plates, nor pollen baskets, and can’t fly well. They cannot feed themselves, so they are fed by the worker bees. Drones are the husbands of the queen which lay the eggs which produce new workers and queens. Before winter comes, the workers drive out the drones, stop feeding them, or sting them to death, since they no longer contribute anything to the hive.
Three days after the egg is laid, it hatches into a tiny white worm-like creature without eyes or legs called a grub or larvae. At first it is fed a substance called royal jelly – a creamy milk-like product produced by glands in the heads of young workers, which is rich in protein and vitamins. After two or three days, the grub is shifted to a diet of mixed honey and pollen called beebread. This stage lasts for 5-6 days.
Afterwards the grub covers itself with silky fibers which make a cocoon. Inside the cocoon the grub turns into a pupa. In this stage the body of the bee is finally formed and it emerges from the cocoon after 7-14 days.
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Bee Happy: When a worker bee returns to the hive with a load of nectar or pollen, it begins to dance in interesting patterns. Scientists found that the speed, duration, and pattern of this “joy dance” tell her fellow workers the location of the new source of nectar which the dancer had discovered. Then they fly out to gather the nectar or pollen from the same place and have no difficulty in finding it. Trained scientists watching the bees in specially designed glass hives are able to understand the directions!
We don’t know what mood the bees have when they dance. But the bees’ dance-like communication system can inspire us to communicate with others in a way that will make them happy. Happiness is contagious!
Spread Sweetness: Torah is like honey, “The Torah is sweeter than honey to my mouth,” sang King David. So just like a honeybee spreads the news of the sweet nectar it found to the rest of the colony, so too should we spread the word of Torah to those who are still unfamiliar with it.
A bee knows that spreading her knowledge is important for her entire colony to prosper. By spreading the sweetness of Torah and mitzvahs to others, you can enhance the capability of the Jewish people to fulfill its purpose, and to be a “light unto the nations.”
Don’t waste honey: Even though honey is produced by bees to serve as food for themselves, centuries of selective breeding by humans has created honeybees that produce far more honey than the colony needs. But consider how much a bee needs to work to make just a bit of honey. To make just one teaspoon of honey bees need to travel about 778 miles (1252km) and visit more than 40,000 flowers!
If the teaspoon of honey ends up in your mouth, it means that in truth G-d sent them to do all this work just for you, so that you have additional energy to serve G-d. When you do a mitzvah with this energy, the bees and the thousands of flowers become partners in your mitzvah, and their purpose of creation is achieved. |
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Psalms. (119:103; 19:11).
Talmud. Bechorot. (7b).
Mindel, Nissan (1967). Honeybee. Talks and Tales, Vol. XXVI, No. 8-9 (317-8). New York: Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch.
Wikipedia. (2006). Honeybee. In Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia.
Encyclopaedia Encarta. (2005). Honey Bee.
Stone, David M. (2005). Bee Life Stages. |
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 Colonies will produce a new queen if the old queen is sick or stops laying eggs. This is done by producing a special wax peanut-shaped cell around 7-8 fertilized eggs, and the cell is filled with royal jelly (see article to the left for definitions). When the eggs hatch, the grubs are fed royal jelly during their entire larva stage. This diet causes the grubs to develop into adult queens when they enter the pupa stage. The first new queen to emerge stings to death the other potential queens in her cell, and may even kill the old queen.
A honeybee has five eyes. Three eyes are located on the top of the bee’s head in the form of a triangle. These eyes are very small. The two larger eyes are located on each side of the head. These are “compound” eyes, being made up of thousands of tiny lenses.
The two “feelers,” or antennae, give the honeybee a keen sense of smell, which is very important for the bee in locating its food. They can detect the smell of a flower a mile away.
The bee has four very thin wings. These move very fast in flight, about 13,800 times a minute or 230 beats per second. The bee can fly as well as hover over flowers, and can carry a load of nectar which is heavier than itself. The bee has six legs. Each leg has a sticky pad, and this enables bees to walk upside down across the ceiling of the hive, and to cling to flower petals.
To make one pound of honey, bees need to visit 2.6 million flower and travel 50,000 miles (80,000 km). This is more than twice the distance around the earth! |
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Strange as it may seem, bee honey is a kosher food. We say it is “strange,” because the general rule is that “what comes out of an unclean (tameh) thing is unclean.” In other words, according to Jewish law, if an animal is itself not kosher, then anything it produces is not kosher. For this reason milk from a mare, or camel, is not kosher, because the horse and camel are non-kosher animals. Now, the bee is a non-kosher insect, yet its honey is kosher.
The reason is that a bee does not really produce honey from its body. It merely collects the nectar from blossoms and stores it in the honey comb. The Creator has given the honeybee two stomachs. One is its personal stomach where it digests its own food. The other is really a honey sac. It is a “tank” where it collects the nectar as it sips it from the blossoms to carry it to the hive. When it has a full load, it regurgitates (“throws up”) the nectar, eats a bit of honey, and stores the rest in the honeycomb. This is why bee honey is kosher.
Honey is used on Rosh Hashanah in a symbolic way. We take a piece of sweet apple, dip it in honey and say a short prayer (in addition to the usual blessing), praying that G-d should renew for us a “good and sweet year.” It is not only good and sweet year in material blessings that we have in mind, but also a good and sweet year in our spiritual life of Torah and mitzvahs, which are “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb” (Psalms). |
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