HESSEQUA NEWS - Do you realize that a bee can visit up to 5 000 flowers in a single day?
Greenfingers Garden Club paid a visit to the local Honeywood Farm. One of their members Sal Carter shared some of the interesting facts they learned.
If you think visiting 5 000 flowers is amazing, consider this. To make one pound of honey, a hive of bees must travel over 55 000 miles and visit two million flowers.
They communicate with each other with a dance; a few bees will go out to find out where the pollen is and come back to the hive to tell the others in which direction they must go. They fly at 25 km an hour and their wings beat 200 times a second.
The females do all the foraging for food and live for only 5 or 6 weeks. They are so busy but produce only half a teaspoon of honey each.
The worker bee lays an egg from which a queen is hatched and she will mate with a drone to ensure genetic diversity, then the drones work is done.
Of the approximately 300 commercial crops about 84% are insect pollinated. Insects are responsible for 80-85% of all pollinated commercial hectares, with fruits, vegetables, oilseeds, legumes and fodder, representing approximately one-third of global food production, mostly pollinated by Apis mellifera L. (honeybees).
South African Bee Industry Organisation (SABIO) South Africa is home to two sub-species or races of honeybees which are indigenous to the country: Apis mellifera Scutellata (or African bee) and Apis mellifera Capensis (or Cape bee).
The Cape bee is generally confined to the western and southern Cape regions particularly referred to as the Fynbos region running in an imaginary line between Vredendal on the western Atlantic coastline across to Willowvale on the eastern Indian Ocean coastline.
The African bee covers the region to the north of this area although there is hybrid zone overlapping the two regions where A.m. capensis and A.m. scutellata hybridize.
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