I was catching up on my stack of New Yorkers, and read a great article on honey bees & their mysterious disappearance. Highly recommend.
I also learned a couple random facts about bees:
- Honeybees are the only animals besides humans known to have a representational language: they convey to one another the location of food by dancing.
- When the queen lays an egg, she is able to choose its sex.
- Males, known as drones, perform no useful function except to mate. They are loutish and filthy, and the workers?sterile females?tolerate their presence for a few months a year, then systematically murder them.
- A single pound of clover honey represents the distilled nectar of some 8.7 million flowers.
- In a week, a productive hive can add seventy pounds of honey to its stores.
