detail from: KRK Art dizajn

BEE and MAN

Dr sci. Simo Jelača

A bee is an insect from the genus Hymenoptera. Its main feature is that it collects pollen for its nutrition, as a source of proteins, which also pollinates plants, and thus develops plant fruits, as human food. Bees play a vital role for humans, producing honey, royal jelly, propolis, and wax. The bee is the most important living creature on earth, next to man.

Nature can do without man, but man cannot do without nature. Likewise, a bee can do without a man, but a man cannot do without a bee. The main role of the bee in nature is to pollinate plants, and plants without pollination would remain fruitless. That would leave a person without food.

Bees are an animal genus that lives and works in a community. As far as is known, bees have been living on earth for over 150 million years, they live in swarms, and in one swarm they have one queen, the queen of the society, about 50,000 to 80,000, and often up to 150,000 worker bees and an unspecified number of drones. Worker bees perform all the necessary actions in the hive: they feed the queen, make honey, honeycomb, royal jelly, propolis, wax, and maintain cleanliness, protect the colony from unwanted invaders, collect pollen, maintain temperature and humidity in the colony, etc. Everything works in complete perfection. Their society is based on the principle of motherhood. Bees are quite aggressive towards unwanted visitors. All bees have their own venom, which acts as a defense venom, and it also has a beneficial, healing effect, in certain forms. How fortunate that the human race is based on the same principle as the bee race. We would all work perfectly precisely, listen to the queen without question, we would all have everything we need and we would all be equal. It would be a kind of heaven on earth.

In Europe, the history of beekeeping began to be recorded in the seventeenth century. Among the first scientists and experts are recorded: Swamerdan, who was the first to determine the gender of the queen bee, female. He recorded the queen as the mother of the bee colony. Then, Reomir explained the creation of bee swarms, the architecture of the hive and explained that bees work non-stop from sunrise to sunset. The priest Giron described the virgin reproduction of the queen bee, and Langstroth perfected the construction of the honeycomb hive. And, finally, DeHruska perfected a device for spinning honey from the honeycomb, based on the principle of centrifugal force.

It is believed that there are about 20,000 species of bees in the world. In Europe, the most famous are the Carniolan bee, the Italian bee and the Caucasian bee. They differ from each other in the color shade. Each bee has a symmetrical body shape, fused from three rings into functional groups, the head, chest and back, it has two eyes and two antennae on its head, it has six legs and two wings each. The worker bee is about 15 mm in size, and the queen is twice the size of the worker bee. Most often they are light brown in color. The worker bee hatches from the eggs in 21 days, the queen in 16 days, and the drone in 24 days. Drones in bee society only serve to fertilize the queen, after which the drone dies. If the drone is not capable of fertilization, the worker bees throw it out of the hive to die. The worker bee lives about 30 to 45 days, the queen about 3 to 5 years, sometimes up to 7 years. When the queen dies, worker bees produce a new queen. And when another queen is found in the bee colony, the bee colony swarms, separates. A swarm of bees leaving the hive is usually caught on a nearby tree or similar convenient place, from where the beekeepers remove it with the help of smoke and place it in a newly prepared hive with a few frames of honey or at least sugar for the initial nutrition of the new bee colony. Swarming is usually done during favorable temperatures, most often in May.

The queen bee has the role of laying eggs in the bee society to create a new birth, she lays about 2,000 eggs a day, and during her lifetime she lays about 200,000 eggs, which means that one queen lays an entire bee swarm or even a little more. The queen is known to move in the direction of the sun in the hive, in the morning she is on the eastern side of the hive, around noon around the middle of the hive, between the frames, and in the evening she is on the western side of the hive. Worker bees communicate with each other through dance games. A bee cannot survive alone, if it stays alone it will soon die. Therefore, bees live and work in society. Bees are very well oriented, they go very far from their hive, looking for flowers, and return with extraordinary precision. They are extremely aware of color nuances, so beekeepers are therefore recommended to paint their hives with different colors, which they all do. By the way, bees are very educated creatures.

During the collection of pollen, each worker bee visits about 1000 flowers a day, so the bee colony of one hive collects pollen from about 5 million flowers a day. Worker bees fly up to 10 km from the hive to the flowers, if they are hungry, although on average they fly about three kilometers, but during one day, they fly several times. The bee is the only insect on earth that produces food for itself, and humans use the same food. Bee products, honey and royal jelly are non-perishable. Bees make honeydew to feed the queen, and they make honey for their own food. The honeydew contains all the vitamins and minerals necessary for life. For humans, honeydew even rejuvenates and regenerates the pancreas. During regular use of the jelly, the number of red blood cells doubles in 15 days. One teaspoon of honey jelly contains about 340-350 mg of vitamins. In addition to the mentioned products, bees also produce a product called Porga, which is fermented pollen mixed from several plants. It is good for prostate treatment and also increases iron and hemoglobin content. Bee honey contains 95 d0 99% of fructose dry matter. Honey has the property of crystallization, during long standing. One tablespoon of honey has 68 calories. All bee products are of the best quality, healthy and medicinal.

By transferring pollen from one plant to another, the bee achieves the birth of a new plant and plant products. Bees are very sensitive to pesticides and that's why beekeepers must be very precise in their application. To increase the number of bees, it is recommended to plant flowers wherever possible and to mow meadows only after flowering. Children, as the next generation, should be educated about all this.

If all the bees in the world were to die out, human life on Earth would become a question of survival. There would be no pollination of fruits and vegetables, that type of food would disappear and a third of humanity would die out in a relatively short period. A fortunate circumstance for the human race is that grains are pollinated by the wind, so the part of humanity that mainly consumes grain products would survive longer. And, for example, raspberries and cherries depend solely on bee pollination.

The bees should be left with enough honey for their survival during the winter, and it is good to supplement them in the spring. Beekeeping is a very good economic branch, that brings significant income to the country, and we are talking about healthy products with medicinal effects. The experience of beekeeping is passed down from generation to generation, and the technology of production and preservation of bee products is being improved in parallel. Bees can be said to be very smart creatures and they are very valuable. Bees surpass man in many ways. Successful beekeepers regularly move their hives to areas where there are more flowering plants at a given time, which gives increased yields of honey and other bee products.

The appearance of the bee and its work

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