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Good day to all :) Our animal week blog article series finishes with an insect, actually. After writing about pigs and sheep because these are the animals I came across to recently and it seemed natural to dig up some information about them, I started thinking what the third article should be about. I wanted it to be something meaningful, so, again, it only seems natural to make it about the maybe most important farm inhabitant – the bee. Since you are following this blog, there should be no need to explain why bees are considered to be of such great importance. If they go, we go.

• No way you haven`t heard the famous quote “"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live." Everyone thinks Einstein said it. Nope. Turns out it was first written down about 40 years after his death in 1955.

• Bees do not spend the winter in hibernation, contrary to common belief. They practice group shivering – huddled together, they make it through the cold months.

• They can distinguish human faces, Australian researchers discovered.

• Honey can heal a wound, as a matter of fact it is a traditional remedy for infected wounds. It has low levels of hydrogen peroxide and also absorbs the moisture that bacteria lives on.

• There are 16, 000 species and only 5% of them are social bees, most are solitary insects.

• Bees don`t always die after stinging, in fact they can keep on stinging other insects and some types of animals at no risk for themselves. Not the case with humans, when a bee stings a human, the stinger get caught in the flesh and rip off along with some of its insides attached to it.

• Who the Queen bee is affects the colony`s personality and behavior. Once the Queen changes, so do they.

• Just like us, humans, honeybees do not know it all from birth :) Young bees need someone to teach them how to make honey.

• Bees are the only insects to produce food eaten by mankind.

• This one will make all our male readers sick. You`ve been warned, so… bees are somewhat of sexual cannibalism. When a male bee (drone) mates with the queen his sex organ is ripped off him and left inside her. The point is to prevent anyone else from being with her, but it doesn`t work as after his death – of course he dies after the act – she mates with many other drones.

source: Google images

So, dears, enjoy the freedom you have and beehave :)