Honey was called the nectar of the gods.

Honey is produced by bees from plant nectar.

Worker honey bees weigh about a tenth of a gram and are usually between ½ to 5/8 inch long. Queens and Drones are longer and weigh a bit more. Beekeepers who purchase bees buy them by the pound. There are on an average about 3500 bees in a pound.

Honeydew is a sweet liquid excreted by some insects like aphids which may be collected by honey bees. In some parts of Europe honey made from honeydew is usually called Forest Honey and can be very expensive to purchase.

Honey bees' wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.

The bee's digestive fluids contain enzymes that transform the nectar into honey.

A honey bee can only sting once and then she dies because her stinger is ripped out during the stinging process.

To produce 1 pound of honey requires somewhere around 25,000 trips between the hive and the flowers.

A pound of honey contains the essence of about 2 million flowers.

The color and flavor of the honey are determined by the flowers from which the nectar is taken.

Honey is most often served in its natural state like jam or jelly.

Without the pollination services provided by honey bees, many of our typical foods such as apples, cucumbers and watermelons would not be available.

Honey is also widely used in baked good.

Honey is generally marketed in one of three forms. Comb honey, chunk honey, and extracted honey.

There are more than 20,000 species of bees, and they are found all over the world except in Antarctica.

Bees are flying insects, and like all insects they have six legs and three body parts. The head, thorax and the abdomen.

Bees see all color humans do except red. and they can also see ultraviolet.

Bees have biting jaws called mandibles and a mouth-tongue proboscis, which they use for sucking and lapping.

Bees can distinguish very slight differences in sweet and bitter tastes, and they can also identify sour and salty tastes.

American Indians called honey bees the "White Man's Fly ".

Bees have no ears, but they can sense the vibrations of the surfaces upon which they alight.

Honeybees range from about ½ inch to 1 inch long. depending upon species.

Bees living in man-made hives behave the same way as bees that live in the wild.

Honeybee colonies are divided into three groups within the hive. The queen , the workers and the drones.

The workers are female bees that do not lay eggs but do all the work necessary for the upkeep and protection of the hive.

The drone bees are the male bees of the colony. They're only purpose is to breed with a virgin queen, after which they die. Drones do no work within the colony and do not have a sting. Near the end of the season any drones left in the colony are driven out by the workers and starve to death.

The queen can lay up to 2,000 eggs per day one to a cell.

Worker bees develop from fertilized eggs and drones develop from unfertilized eggs. In the insect world this common type of development is known as parthenogenesis.

The egg hatches into a tiny larva after about three days (72 hours)

At first all larvae are fed royal jelly, or bee milk.

The worker bees cap the cell with wax and the larva inside spins a cocoon and becomes a pupa.

At around 10 days of age the workers start producing wax, which is used to repair and construct cells.

Worker bees make propolis ( bee glue) from the resins of certain types of trees and bushes and use it to fill cracks and holes in the hive as well as using it to cover objects foreign to the hive which are to big for them to remove from the hive.

A worker bee lets other workers know about a new source of food it has discovered by rapidly vibrating its wings and performing a dance , to show the others how far and in what direction to go to find the new source.

By the age of 20 days the young worker may become a guard at the entrance to the hive.

A worker may live several months, but when there are large amounts of nectar and pollen to be gathered she may work very hard and die in only six weeks.

Honey was early man's first sweetener and it was so valued that it could be used to pay taxes in some cultures.

Bees have been producing honey from flowering plants for 10-12 million years.

The average worker honey bee makes 1/12 of a teaspoon honey in her lifetime.

A honey bee flies about 15 miles per hour.

A honeycomb cell has six sides.

Utah is known as the beehive state.

A honey bee has four wings.

The hive box which honey is stored in is called the "super".

A drone honey bee has no father, but it does have a grandfather on his mother's side.

Through a combination of fanning their wings and spreading out water drops in the beehive, bees can operate a water-cooled air conditioner to cool their hive during warm periods of the season.

During cold periods honey bees consume honey to give them energy to vibrate their flight muscles which creates heat to warm the colony. They also cluster in a ball within the hive to conserve heat

During the summer, the typical honey bee colony contains between 40,000 to 70,000 bees.